


Through Dark Waters

by andthatisterrible



Category: Person of Interest (TV)
Genre: Dishonored AU, F/F, and whales!, kind of a fantasy world industrial revolution with swords and pistols and supernatural powers, sort of steam punk except it's whale oil punk
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-27
Updated: 2019-06-06
Packaged: 2020-02-07 08:28:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 41,544
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18616903
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/andthatisterrible/pseuds/andthatisterrible
Summary: Shaw returns from the mysterious continent of Pandyssia to Dunwall, the city of her birth looking for answers about the strange new powers she was gifted on her trip and maybe also for a little time to recover. Instead she finds herself diving straight into a new mess filled with deposed religious orders, street gangs, robberies, plots, masquerades, and more. And as for the strange woman from the Void who gifted Shaw with her new powers and seems to follow her everywhere, well, Shaw hasn't quite figured out what she wants to do about her yet.This is set in the video game world of Dishonored, but was written with the assumption most readers haven't played any of the games. It uses the world building and setting and aesthetics of the game (though none of the characters appear), but explains everything the reader will need to know from scratch. Please don't be scared off by the game setting!





	1. Homecoming

**Author's Note:**

> This fic is fully written already. 10 chapters long, about 40k words. I'll be posting one a week. I was wavering between rating this M or E, but while there is sex in it, it's much later on, and not really _that_ explicit.
> 
> As mentioned in the summary, this was written so that someone unfamiliar with the games hopefully wouldn't be lost. If you see terms or names you don't recognize at first, there's a good chance I explain what they mean somewhere in the story. Basically, don't be scared off because you don't know the setting! And for people who have played the games, hopefully you'll enjoy the world building I did on top of what was in the games. I chose to take a couple little bits of lore that weren't fully explored and expand on them which turned out to be super fun.
> 
> This does contain some spoilers for the game series since it is set AFTER the last DLC for the game. The spoilers are more about the state of the world than about any specific things that happen in any of the games. None of the characters from the game show up as more than mentions but there's a lot of places and items and lore.
> 
> Also a huge thank you to [themaarika](https://themaarika.tumblr.com) for reading through the whole thing and being very supportive while I wrote.

_"She has seen me through dark waters._  
_Soon she will see me unobscured."  
\- The Outsider_

 

 

Night was starting to settle over the city of Dunwall, only the faintest rays of sunlight still illuminating the horizon and casting the whaling trawlers with their grisly cargo as harsh silhouettes against the mouth of the river. On the highest point on Kaldwin's Bridge, Sameen Shaw hunched down against the wind and looked out over the dark city that she hadn't seen for what felt like a lifetime now even if it had only been a year.

“I forgot how much it stinks here,” she said aloud though there was no one else perched on the bare metal struts of the top of the bridge. A good ways below her there were several levels of staircases and corridors on the bridge, protected by the city guards and those large electrical contraptions that were still so popular. These days, the Empress had decreed that the buzzing metal arc pylons could only be set to stun and not kill, but ‘accidents’ still happened from time to time and people got disintegrated by the lightning the pylons shot. Between the guards, the arc pylons, and the lack of any stairs or path up to the very top, there shouldn't have been a way for anyone to reach the beam that Shaw was sitting on.

“Thought it'd be better once I got away from the boats, but the damm smell gets everywhere, doesn't it?”

The slight tingling on the back of her left hand told her she wasn't just talking to herself, but then she rarely was alone these days. It was damned annoying, but at least there was someone to gripe at.

“Would you rather be back where I found you?”

The voice came from right behind Shaw, which should have been impossible since there was nowhere back there to stand. Shaw glanced over her shoulder only long enough to see the form of a woman sitting cross-legged, floating in mid-air. It was too dark to make out her features, but Shaw was already well-acquainted with them.

“No, I guess I'd take whale guts over that place.” She still had strange dreams about the jungle sometimes. They'd woken her up frequently on the pirate vessel she'd earned passage on, and less frequently (but still with some regularity) on the whaling boat she'd worked on for the rest of the voyage home from Pandyssia. “Has the Empress sent any other expeditions since mine?”

“No, though there's been talks about sending another when the weather improves, to find out what happened to yours if nothing else.”

Her companion must have been in the mood to share information for once since she wasn't spouting her usual cryptic nonsense.

“She should just call it quits and focus on finding a way to make this city not stink like dead whales. Be a much better use of her time.” She squinted to examine the dark hulking form of Dunwall tower further down the river. Somewhere inside those walls was the royal family, possibly even now planning another doomed mission.

“But the whale guts are part of Dunwall's charm,” her companion teased, she paused and then continued in a more serious tone. “You could tell her, you know. Warn the Empress off of any more doomed expeditions. She might even listen to you, what with you being the only surviving member of the last expedition and all.”

Shaw was a little surprised. Her companion rarely offered suggestions--usually it was only observations and uncalled for snark.

“None of my concern.” And she'd rather not have her survival become public knowledge.

“More innocent people could die. How many of your expedition even made it to land?” The question might have been serious, but her tone was mocking again.

“People could die, but no one on that boat was innocent.” The almost-mythical continent of Pandyssia had been a huge draw for collectors and investors alike. There had been a few among the group who'd gone in hopes of studying the elusive and extraordinary flora and fauna, and quite a few interested in staking a claim to some of the land and resources of the supposedly unsettled continent. The rest had been people like her, hired fighters looking for an easy escape from the Isles. She hadn't planned on ever coming back, but what she'd found out in the jungles of Pandyssia had turned out to be far worse than anything the gangs or the overseers here could dream up.

“Is Dunwall how you remembered it being?” The voice was right next to her and Shaw had to keep herself from jumping. Her companion sat next to her on the beam now, legs kicking back and forth slowly in space.

“Seems smaller.” Though after Pandyssia everything seemed smaller.

“That's it? Smaller?” Her companion sounded amused. “There was a coup while you were gone, and a massacre, several shifts in power, and a entire district of the city was in ruins. Again. That _does_ seem to happen here a lot.”

“Exactly. And everything's back the way I last saw it.” Though she hadn't ventured much into the city itself yet. She'd headed straight here after slipping off the whaling trawler she'd returned on, and had stuck to the banks of the Wrenhaven river that flowed through the center of the city rather than entering any of the districts proper. Her time in the wilds had only strengthen her instinct to climb up high and scout things out before moving. “Why? Is there something I should know?”

“Oh, there's always things worth knowing, Shaw.” Her companion leaned in closer to her, her solid black eyes glowing like coals in the fading light. “And it's going to be so much fun watching you try to find out.” Her face was inches from Shaw's now. “Though maybe I could be persuaded to give you a hint.”

Shaw knew from experience that if she reached out to grab her companion’s arm, her fingers would pass through her as if she were smoke, and yet she could swear she felt the heat of another body against her skin where they almost touched.

“I thought the Outsider was supposed to stay neutral in the affairs of the world. Embodiment of the chaotic and unfeeling Void and all.”

“The Outsider is gone, Shaw. We've been over this. I'm a little...different than he was.”

It was a conversation they'd had many variants of since that day her companion had appeared to her in the dark forests of Pandyssia, but it always seemed to get a bit of a rise out of her so Shaw never missed the opportunity to bring it up again.

“Okay, well, if you've got anything to tell me, not-the-Outsider, now's the chance. I've got somewhere to be.” It was a partial lie, and they both knew that.

“Did you know that the Outsider had a name once?” Her companion asked as if she hadn't heard her. “They say when he was finally freed from the Void it was because someone whispered it to him.”

“Wait, the Outsider was _freed_?” The tall man with black eyes who'd been the living embodiment of the Void and a symbol of all things occult and supernatural in the world (and, some said, a god) for longer than anyone could remember had definitely vanished and most assumed he'd been destroyed somehow. No longer did he appear in dreams and at shrines to gift humans with visions and, on very rare occasions, his mark. Shaw hadn't known all that when her companion had appeared to her for the first time, and she'd wondered if she wasn't some new manifestation of the Outsider himself, but she had discarded that theory rather quickly. “You looking to be freed as well then?” Maybe that was why Shaw had been chosen.

Her companion smiled enigmatically and, even as Shaw watched, dark tendrils of the Void wrapped around her like smoke as she faded from view.

“Now why would I ever want that? But maybe someday I'll tell you my name, Shaw.” Her voice faded away after the rest of her and left Shaw alone on top of the bridge.

“Guess there's no more putting this off then,” Shaw said to the empty night.

She looked down at the mark on the back of her left hand--a large circle, almost fully closed with a straight line running from the center out through the small opening. It looked like someone had burned it into her skin and it had definitely felt that way when she'd received it. If her companion wasn't the Outsider, then this wasn't the Outsider's mark, but what it actually was then she hadn't figured out yet, and for the moment it didn't matter.

She opened her hand wide and then clenched her fingers into a fist, grabbing at the fabric of reality and twisting it until she was elsewhere, perched on a metal strut a few down from the first. The eerie blue glow from the mark on the back of her hand faded after a second, but came back when she twisted again and again, making her way down the tower and leaving behind only the faintest trace of void smoke and the slight sound from the rush of displaced air. Within seconds, the top levels of the bridge returned to how they'd always been--silent and empty--and a small figure wrapped tightly in a long coat vanished into the lights of the city below.

* * *

 

_Shaw had always prided herself on her rationality. She'd assumed that her inability to be swayed by fear or other useless emotions would have given her an advantage on the voyage to Pandyssia--a land shrouded in tales of mystery and madness--and in the end maybe it had._

_Only twelve of them made it to shore after the...creature destroyed their ship. She wasn't sure what manner of beast the huge tentacles that had wrapped themselves around the ship had belonged to, and she was fairly sure she didn't ever want the chance to find out._

_They had almost no supplies left and were stranded on a seemingly endless beach with a dark jungle stretching away at the edge of the sand. Water had been the first priority, but they lost two men before they found a creek safe enough to drink from. One man was taken by a beast that, in the brief look Shaw got at it, resembled an enormous and misshapen spotted dog with a bark like the laughter of a madman. They found tracks of more of the animals all over and slept in the trees that night. When morning came, another of their party was gone, vanished without a trace._

_Over the next week, their numbers dwindled to five. Some were killed by the plants and animals in the jungle, all larger than any they'd seen before and twice as aggressive, and some simply walked off into the night and vanished._

_The others spoke of seeing things that did not exist, hearing voices singing to them from the night, and Shaw couldn't deny she'd witnessed these things as well, but she knew they were nothing more than illusions of the Void and refused to be shaken by them. So she watched the others go mad one after another and inevitably succumb to the curse of Pandyssia._

_And then she was alone and time seemed to blur into an endless nightmare. Day and night went away leaving the world in a grey haze. Large creatures slipped in and out of existence around her in the trees, and everywhere she could hear the unearthly whirring song that she suspected had driven the others mad._

_Her original plan to escape back to the beach and search for a way off the blasted shore seemed impossible, for even if she climbed the highest tree she could see nothing but endless jungle in all directions. The sky above flickered and twisted when she tried to search for stars, and once she swore she saw a whale swim by in the ocean of the night._

_Every time she awoke everything around her had changed and any markers she'd left out were gone. Every time she lay down to sleep it became harder and harder to ignore the grinding music that permeated everything._

_She was weak from hunger, dehydration, and exhaustion when she staggered into the cave and collapsed to floor, and that was where the woman with black eyes had found her._

_In the days and weeks that followed, Shaw sometimes wondered if perhaps she had actually died back in that cave._

* * *

 

For someone who eluded the city guard on a daily basis, John Reese’s whereabouts were surprisingly easy to guess, though Shaw had the advantage of knowing him well. Even after a year. There were only so many taverns in Dunwall that weren't owned by one of the gangs or heavily populated by the off-duty guards. The taverns along Dunwall Harbor were mostly full of sailors, fresh off the boats, and definitely not on the lookout for a notorious criminal.

Shaw peered through the thick glass window of the second tavern she'd tried, craning her neck to try and catch sight of a familiar face in the crowd. She didn't have any actual proof that Reese was still in Dunwall or even alive, but she had to look anyway.

“He's not in that one.”

Shaw ignored the voice from behind her. Her companion wasn't going to help her and acknowledging her would only make her worse. Still, she knew she wasn't lying, so she made to move on to the next one, but froze when she caught sight of her own reflection in the glass. There hadn't been mirrors on either of the ships she'd taken back so it had been ages since she'd seen her own face so clearly. She definitely looked different--cheeks hollowed out and dark circles under her eyes--and she felt suddenly uncomfortable and turned away to try the next tavern.

She had to rip a few tattered posters off the window of the third tavern to get a look inside--one advertising Cullero Cigars and another about whale oil rationing--reminders that she was back in civilization now. She recognized Reese from the back even in the dim light of the lamps burning in the tavern’s common room. It took him a second to place her though and surprise spread across his usually stoic face when she sat down across from him at his small table in the corner.

“Shaw?” Some emotion flickered through his eyes and vanished before she could recognize it. “I thought...a trawler found pieces of your expedition's ship at sea, smashed to bits. Everyone assumed the worst.”

“The truth is a lot worse than what everyone assumed.” She reached across the table and relieved him of his mug. “But I'm back now.” Reese's ale was hardly the finest Dunwall had to offer, but after months of drinking the tar-like brew on the trawler it tasted like a glass of the finest brandy.

Reese was still too much in shock to mind the theft of his ale. “And you're actually here, right? You're not some Void ghost or hallucination?”

She kicked him in the leg, hard. “That real enough for you?”

Reese grimaced and rubbed his leg. “There's been no shortage of strangeness in Dunwall since you left. Having your ghost show up would seem less impossible than you actually being here. How did you...what happened out there?”

Shaw tightened the fingers of her left hand into a fist so she could feel the leather strap she'd wrapped around it pull across the mark. “Honestly? I'm not completely sure.” She thought she heard (or possibly _felt_ ) laughter coming from nearby. At least her companion had stayed mostly silent so far. “It doesn't matter though. I need to talk to you.” She lowered her voice. “About Daud.”

“Oh.” Reese stared at her in silence for a long second. “We should probably go somewhere else then.”

* * *

 

_“I can help you, if you'd like.”_

_Shaw stared up at the strange woman standing over her, not fully believing she was real._

_The woman knelt down next to her, her head tilted to one side as she watched her. “I can help you,” she repeated, “but only if you accept.”_

_“Who the hell are you?” And then she saw the woman's eyes--solid black and glowing like embers. She knew of only one thing that had eyes like that. “If you're really the Outsider then there's a lot of artists out there who've been lied to.” Every painting showed the Outsider as a tall, skinny man with dark hair, not a woman with long brown hair and a mischievous smirk._

_“Oh, I'm not the Outsider, Shaw, but for right now let's say I'm something...similar, and like him, I can offer you the ability to help yourself however you see fit.”_

_Shaw had heard enough stories to understand what she was being offered, hell, because of Reese she'd heard more than most about the powers the Outsider's mark gave to humans. While the powers such a mark granted were intriguing, in other circumstances she believed she would have turned them down._

_But it wasn't other circumstances._

_“Fine. Get me out of this goddamn place and I'll kill whoever you want.”_

_“Kill?” The woman looked amused. “That's not how this works. Not for the Outsider and not for me. I just give you the powers, and the rest? Entirely up to you.”_

_Shaw swallowed as she tried to force some moisture back into her dry mouth. “So you just give people extraordinary powers out of the goodness of your heart?”_

_The woman laughed, her lips curling up in delight. “Sometimes you drop a wolf in the hen house just to see what will happen.” Her smile was a bit too toothy to be reassuring. “Now hold still.”_

_The burning pain on the back of Shaw's left hand only lasted a few seconds and left behind a charred black brand. Her whole hand felt odd, almost like a cold draft was blowing on it from somewhere unseen._

_“Good, now up you get.” The woman stood up and offered Shaw her hand. Shaw thought about refusing it, but she was in poor enough shape that she figured turning down any help would be pointless now. She reached out to grab the woman's hand and…_

_...her hand passed through the offered hand as if it were smoke._

_Shaw glared up at the woman which only made her look more amused._

_“Oops, forgot about that little problem.”_

_Like hell she had._

_“Maybe there's a better way.” The woman leaned back down and reached out as if to take Shaw's hand, but this time instead of her hand passing through, the entire cave fell away around Shaw and left her on an island of grey stone, floating in empty space. All around them things flickered and danced in the endlessness._

_Shaw had seen enough paintings of the Void to know where she was. The woman's fingers curled around her hand and pulled her to her feet._

_“We're going to have so much fun together.”_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> quote is from the dishonored 2 dlc game Death of the Outsider which this story takes place a few months after.
> 
> if you're interested in getting a visual on the aesthetic of the setting (including a shot of the bridge from the beginning of the fic), you can check out [the trailer for the original game](https://youtu.be/-XbQgdSlsd0). warning: contains a lot of stabbing and throat cutting but doesn't look very realistic.


	2. Leviathan

“Is it true? About what happened to the Overseers, I mean,” Shaw asked as she followed Reese through the dark streets. A guard strode by them, sword and pistol at her belt, and Shaw tugged the hood of her coat down further over her face.

“Very true, so you shouldn’t need to hide anymore.” Reese must have noticed her effort to conceal herself. “Unless you pissed off someone else in the last year.”

“No one but a bunch of oversized monsters.”

“So the rumors about Pandyssia are true then?”

Shaw looked back over her shoulder to make sure the guard had really passed by. Overseers gone or not, she didn’t trust anyone in this city.

“The only thing anyone needs to know about Pandyssia is to stay the fuck away from it.” Though she knew it was only a matter of time before the Empress sent someone else there. “It’s a shame the Overseers didn’t all get shipped there. They would have had all the unholy witchcraft to fight that they could ever have wanted.” And the large carnivores. It was nice to imagine a masked Overseer’s head getting crunched between the teeth of one of the monstrous dogs.

“Most of the Overseers got arrested, and the rest are still being hunted down,” John said. “The Empress banned the Abbey and rounded them all up. Guess she was pissed about her conflicts with them in Karnaca.”

Shaw snorted. “Bunch of religious fanatics who’ve been stealing children and killing innocent people for looking the wrong way for years, but the Empress doesn’t do a thing until they make _her_ life difficult.” She knew all too well about the practices of the Abbey of the Everyman, the only religious order in the Isles, and the militant Overseers who ruled it. Everyone had heard the rumors that they stole children from their homes to induct them into their order (or kill them if they didn’t meet their standards), but Shaw knew exactly how true those rumors were. She may have been born in Dunwall, but there was a reason her mother had fled with her to Fraeport when she’d been young.

“At least they’re gone now. Though with the Outsider vanished their purpose would have been a bit unclear.”

Shaw wondered how her companion felt about all this. Sure, she said she wasn’t the Outsider, but Shaw had gotten the impression she was some sort of replacement which would mean the Abbey would have hated her, too.

There was hissing noise from the cross street they passed and Shaw turned to see one of those walls of light that had seemed to be everywhere before she left. The entrance to the road had electric coils installed on either side like a gate and blue sparks jumped between them. She’d seen someone pushed into one of those a few times, disintegrated in an instant and barely leaving ash behind. The discovery of whale oil as a source of fuel had brought many wonders to the Isles but also things like the arc pylons and the walls of light.

“You wanted to ask me about Daud?” Reese prompted.

“Yeah.” She looked around the empty streets. It didn’t feel safe to talk here, but she wasn’t sure anywhere would have. At least the light rain was keeping people inside tonight. “He was marked by the Outsider, and he somehow shared his powers with his gang, right?” Daud had been the notorious leader of the gang of assassins called the Whalers that Reese had belonged to years ago. They'd talked about it before, but that seemed like ancient history now.

“He did, right up until he took off. Did you know the rumor is that he had something to do with the Outsider’s disappearance? Him and his lieutenant, Billie Lurk.”

Shaw hadn’t actually heard that. Maybe she could find out if it was true later when Reese wasn’t around. “Guess he’d have good reason to hate the Outsider. As good as any.” The story went that the Outsider’s mark had always been a blessing and a curse, but just what sort of curse was the information she was currently lacking. “When you were with the Whalers, he shared his powers with you, right?”

“I thought I’d told you about all this before.”

“You did, but I’d like to hear about it again.” Things had changed since then.

Reese looked at her a little oddly. “Where did we get drinks the night before you sailed off to Pandyssia?”

Shaw rolled her eyes. “The Burnt Eel, down on the docks. I’m me, Reese, my memories are just a bit hazy after being away for so long.”

Reese looked like he was considering asking another question, but she glared at him and he refrained.

“Daud shared his powers with almost all the Whalers, myself included. Not all his powers, and none of us were nearly as strong as he was, but we could teleport like him and a few other small tricks.”

“Did you ever see the Outsider?”

“No, he only spoke to Daud. What’s all this about, Shaw?”

Shaw shook her head at the question. “Were there ever any...side-effects from the powers? A cost to be paid?”

“We couldn’t use them forever. Every use they drained us a little more and we’d have to rest before using them again, but there was no curse or mystical bargain or anything. Any penalty for it belonged to Daud alone.”

The screech of metal on metal drew Shaw’s attention. On rails held up high above the streets a carriage flew by on the metal tracks, sparks leaping around it. The number of tracks in the city seemed to have increased greatly since she’d left and she wondered how much whale oil it took to keep them running. The other sailors on the trawler had spoken of how much harder it was to find whales these days. What would happen to Dunwall when all the whales were gone?

A memory stirred in her mind, something she couldn’t recall if it had actually happened, but that still haunted her dreams sometimes. Something moving in the depths.

“Shaw? What’s going on? What happened to you?” Reese looked concerned and it made Shaw’s stomach turn.

“Nothing happened to me. Nothing at all. I need to go now.” She turned away to leave him.

“Shaw, wait. Do you have somewhere to stay?”

She hesitated for only a second. “Yeah,” she lied. “I found somewhere.” She was surprised to find she wanted to take him up on his offer. She’d missed his company this last year, but she wasn’t going to risk pulling her only friend into this mess until she understood exactly what was going on. “I’ll see you soon, Reese.”

She thought she heard him call after her once more before she disappeared down a side street, but she didn’t turn around.

* * *

 

_She wasn’t sure how she’d ended up lying in the tiny row boat floating on the open ocean. She remembered the woman with black eyes and the Void and leaping from stone island to island in the emptiness, twisting the world around her to pull herself over the empty space. She thought maybe she remembered the beach, grey and rainy, but definitely nothing about the boat or how she’d gotten so far out to sea that she couldn’t see the shore._

_There was a half-full water skin in the bottom of the boat that she was sure she’d never seen before. Had the woman with the black eyes given her that? She’d never heard of the Outsider helping anyone in such a direct way._

_She stared up at the sky, glad that at least the sun wasn’t beating down on her here. The sky was uniform grey, stars hidden from sight, and sometimes it seemed like she saw a bright tear streak across it._

_Maybe she was still in the Void. She wasn’t sure how to tell anymore._

_“Are you still there?” she asked the empty ocean._

_It took a minute for her to get a reply._

_“Did you need something, Shaw?” The woman was perched on the prow of her boat watching her closely._

_“Yeah, what do you have to offer in the way of actually useful powers? Like maybe something to summon a decent boat or even a portal back to civilization.”_

_The woman only smiled and Shaw knew she wasn’t going to get a better answer. She searched for something else to ask, hoping to stave off the boredom of slowly dying._

_“You said you weren’t the Outsider, so who are you?”_

_“I’m what comes next.”_

_Shaw should have expected cryptic answers out of her._

_“Do you have a name, or title, or something?”_

_“I do.”_

_Shaw tried to hold in her exasperation. “Okay, so what is it?”_

_The woman shook her head and smiled again. Shaw would have tried to throttle her if she’d had the energy._

_“Fine, what do I call you then?”_

_The woman slid off the edge of the boat to hover above where Shaw lay, her hands and knees on either side of Shaw. Her long hair was hanging down so close that Shaw wondered if she could reach up and touch it or if it would vanish like smoke again._

_“You can call me whatever you’d like, Shaw.” Her black eyes burned brightly._

_“How about a pain in my ass?”_

_“If that’s what you want.’”_

_“You’re really annoying, you know that, right?”_

_The woman laughed, a soft sound that seemed foreign coming from her, and leaned down closer so their faces were only inches from each other. Her hair fell across Shaw’s shoulders and Shaw could feel the weight of it. She wasn’t sure if they were fully in the Void here, but they must not be fully in the real world either if she could feel her._

_“Oh, you have no idea about all the things I know, sweetie.”_

_Strength Shaw hadn’t known she still had let her lunge and grab the woman’s hips with her hands, trap her there. She was startled both by the weight of her (more solid than her mind had expected) and at the same time how light she felt, as if she could fall to ashes and blow away in the slightest breeze._

_“You owe me some answers,” she said, meeting those black eyes with her own._

_The woman didn’t seem at all concerned by Shaw’s grip on her, if anything she seemed pleased. “Maybe some other time.” She leaned down the last few inches and for a brief second Shaw felt lips brush her own, and then the woman had vanished again and Shaw was left clutching air._

_She fell back in the boat with a groan. Well, at least now she was fairly sure the woman wasn’t the Outsider. No one had ever mentioned him flirting with anyone. Not like that anyway._

_The flickers and streaks overhead were more pronounced now, the whole sky twisting and warping in a way that made her head hurt to watch. She shut her eyes and tried to rest._

_She wasn’t sure if she slept or not but the next thing she became aware of was a low, mournful call that sounded both familiar and alien at the same time. She struggled to sit up and looked around to see what could have caused it, but the ocean remained grey and still around her._

_The call came again, reverberating deep inside her and making her feel some emotion she didn’t know how to classify. Mourning for something she’d never seen. She pulled herself to the side of the boat and peered over the edge into the dark waters below. At first she saw nothing but the grey water, but then she made out movement far below. Her brain couldn’t quite make sense of what she was seeing and she shakily climbed to her feet, almost falling over the side, to try and get a better look._

_Below the boat at some depth she couldn’t guess at, something moved under the waves. She caught the suggestion of a massive body, perhaps a flipper, maybe a tentacle. Whatever it was must have been enormous. She struggled to the back of the boat and looked down again. There was definitely an enormous tail on the creature, and the shape of it clicked in her brain._

_That was impossible though. The thing must have been more than twice the size of the largest whale she’d ever seen._

_The haunting cry echoed once more and Shaw stared down at the massive creature that swam gracefully below her. Was it in her world or the void? She’d heard rumors that whales lived in both worlds, but surely there was no way this beast could exist in her world?_

_Another movement caught her eye and she realized that there were more of the leviathans beneath her, a whole pod of the impossibly massive whales._

_The cry came one more time and it was echoed this time by a sound she was much more familiar with. A boat horn. She spun around so quickly she fell over and landed on her ass in the bottom of the row boat. There, on the horizon was a ship. Around her the grey of the void faded away to leave her sitting in a boat under the starry night sky drifting closer to a very real way home._

* * *

 

Even with the work the Empress had done trying to repair Dunwall, the city would always have its dark and broken-down places for people like Shaw to hide in. Her first thought had been to seek refuge in what remained of the Office of the High Overseer in Holger Square, but she’d heard it was heavily patrolled by guards to catch any rogue Overseers who might try and reclaim it. Unfortunate, as there would have been a certain irony to making camp in the ruins of the headquarters of the people who’d driven her from Dunwall twice now.

She ended up heading to the Rudshore Financial District instead. Back during the rat plague that had wiped out so much of the city, the district had been flooded when the dams had broken. The city guard had walled it off and used it to dump the bodies of plague victims and those poor bastards who had been infected but hadn’t died quite yet. It had turned into ruins quite swiftly, building falling down in the rising waters. Daud and his Whalers gang had taken up residence there, if she recalled correctly, used it as a hideout since no one sane would venture there.

After the plague had ended, the district had been drained and rebuilt and was once again full of businesses and factories, but large swathes of buildings still lay in ruins in places, and it was to these places that she looked for a spot to stay the night.

The empty factory she chose had a faded red x mark on the outside leftover from the days of the plague. The brick walls were crumbling and the doors had all rusted off their hinges.

“Perfect,” she said under her breath.

Her time surviving in Pandyssia and then working aboard the whaling trawler had left her in better shape than she'd ever been in before, which was no small feat considering how hard she'd worked herself over the years to stay in top form. It was easy for her to climb up the broken walls of the factory to a rusted metal stair landing that remained welded to the wall even though the stairs below it had fallen away. She could have used her powers to traverse quickly from the floor to the platform in a single twist, but she still tried to avoid using them unless she had no other choice. From the landing she cautiously made her way up the shaky stairs to the second floor. Large parts of the ceiling and floor had fallen away here, but she found herself a corner that was dry and seemed unlikely to collapse overnight.

She’d slept on the deck of the trawler long enough that the idea of sleeping on the ground didn’t bother her much. At least here there were no whales strung up over the deck, still alive and bellowing. She hadn’t cared for the whaling life. Killing had never bothered her, but there was something jarring about seeing the graceful giants of the ocean hunted down and butchered. Some feeling of _wrongness_ accompanied by her hazy memory of the leviathan beneath her small boat. Her companion had avoided her whenever she had been near one of the dying whales, though she’d dodged all questions on the matter.

It was much quieter here in the ruins. Shaw sat on the floor and opened the tin of brined hagfish she’d bought on the way. She’d sworn that once she’d made it to shore she wouldn’t eat canned food ever again, but she’d found herself unwilling to stay in an inn long enough to eat a fresh meal.

“Did you get the answer you were looking for from John Reese?”

Shaw barely looked up. “Wouldn’t you like to know.”

Her companion sat down cross-legged across from her on the dirty floor. “That mark doesn’t curse your soul to wander the Void forever or anything so dramatic. Only your actions can do that.”

Shaw made a face at her dinner. Who knew something could taste worse than the rations she’d had on the trawler? “I figure you’re the only curse I’ve gotten out of this.”

Her companion didn’t answer and Shaw looked up, wondering if she’d somehow hurt her feelings. Did her companion even have feelings? Her face had its usual mocking smile though, and anything she might or might not be feeling was hidden.

“What’s it like living in the Void anyway?” Shaw asked, because even if she wasn’t cursed to wander the Void forever, her companion probably was. “You just float around in the emptiness and pop out to bother me every now and then?”

“It’s quiet. Peaceful. The Void whispers to me, keeps me safe.”

Shaw hadn’t expected an answer, and certainly not a serious one. There was something almost aching in her companion’s words, a sense of longing.

“Then why come here with me so often?”

“Maybe I just like your company.”

Everything Shaw had heard about the Outsider had suggested he only showed up occasionally to those who bore his mark. Her companion seemed to trail her constantly. At first it had been aggravating and a little unsettling, but now, back in the city of her birth and feeling more like a stranger than she had even in the jungle, her presence was almost reassuring.

It wouldn’t do to let her know that, though. “Can’t say I enjoy yours much.”

She remembered the feeling of her companion’s lips brushing against hers in the boat that day. Had that really happened or had it been a hallucination?

“Everyone the Outsider gave powers to, there was a reason for them specifically to have them.” From what she knew anyway. They all had ended up being pivotal to larger events somehow. “Am I about to get mixed up in some bullshit?”

“Have you ever _not_ been mixed up in some bullshit?” her companion countered. “You’d be bored in a week.”

Shaw took that as a yes. “Don’t suppose you’d like to give me a hint as to what I’m up against?”

“That would be cheating.”

“Uh-huh, because you’ve never cheated at anything ever in your life. Unlife. Whatever. Are you even alive?”

Her companion crossed her arms and put on an expression of mock outrage. “Why, Shaw, that’s a very rude question to ask a lady.”

“You’ll get over it.”

Her companion pouted, a strange look with those glowing eyes, and then sighed. “There’s been so many like me before in the Void, mouthpieces for it, woven into the fabric of its being. Each of us were created in a different way. The entity you knew as the Outsider was sacrificed to the Void in a ceremony many thousands of years ago. They slit his throat and cut away his name and bound him to the Void.”

“Is that what happened to you?” The idea of that happening to her companion bothered Shaw more than she cared to admit.

“No, I...volunteered.”

“You volunteered,” Shaw repeated in disbelief. “You volunteered to wander the Void forever.”

Her companion shrugged and smiled. “What can I say? I always liked trying new things.”

“How does one go about volunteering for that? Did you just show up at a shrine and say sign me up?”

“No, it was a lot more...unpleasant than that.” A brief grimace passed over her companion’s face. “I thought you wanted to hear more about the great events you might soon be involved in.”

“And I thought you weren’t allowed to tell me anything about them.”

They both lapsed into silence. Shaw finished the rest of her horrible dinner and chucked the tin over the edge of the floor for the rats below. When she turned back around, her companion had stood up and her hand was extended towards Shaw.

“I want to show you something.”

When their fingers touched the world twisted away and they stood once more on the grey stone islands of the Void. Echoes of the real world were visible around them--the hint of a brick wall, the shadow of distant buildings.

“Follow me.”

Most of the path they took was unrecognizable to Shaw, but sometimes she’d spot a landmark that let her guess where they were in the Void relative to the city in the real world. The two worlds existed one on top of the other, she’d learned, each a breath away from the other though not necessarily arranged in the same order, and sometimes in some places and in certain circumstances a person could see into both worlds at once. Her current theory on Pandyssia was that the whole damned continent was stuck halfway into the Void. It would explain much of what she’d seen there.

She saw the idea of a river stretching far below the stone islands they walked across. The Wrenhaven River, no doubt. They were headed along the river, deeper into the city then, if this part of the Void was structured the same as the real world. It felt like they travelled for forever before her companion finally came to a halt and pointed ahead.

The area of the Void they were in had more shadowy buildings than most Shaw had seen, but everything looked slightly wrong, like there were tears in the world. It looked like the Void had been wounded almost. She recognized the shape of the largest shadow building almost instantly.

“Holger Square. This is the office of the High Overseer.” She turned to look at her companion. “But the Overseers were disbanded and hunted down by the Empress. Why bring me here?”

“There.”

Shaw looked where her companion pointed and saw the worst tear in the Void, a glowing gash that seemed to bleed energy into the fabric of the space around them. It was odd, Shaw thought, because she would have expected a tear between their worlds to leak Void energy into the real world, but this looked almost as if the Void had been wounded.

“What the hell were the Overseers up to?” she asked in horror. She couldn’t give a damn about the holy war between the Overseers and the Void, but this looked like the sort of meddling that ended badly for everyone.

“They were idiots, lashing out blindly with forces they couldn’t understand or control.” There was anger in her companion’s voice. “Most attempts they made were laughable, but one of them took the time to learn all the mysteries forbidden by the Abbey to use as weapons against the Outsider and the Void.”

“Please tell me whoever that was died when the order was disbanded.”

“Unfortunately not.” Her companion looked around, disgust evident on her face. “Let’s go somewhere else. I don’t care for this place.”

They walked back to Shaw’s building in silence. Once they were back to the stone island Shaw recognized as where they’d entered the Void, she expected to be brought back to the real world, but her companion seemed to almost have forgotten her, standing with her back to Shaw, arms wrapped around herself, staring back the way they’d come. Shaw walked over to stand next to her, not sure exactly what was expected of her.

“I can feel it,” her companion said. “Like a cut on my own skin. They ripped into the Void and left a scar and I can feel it.”

“Can you kill them?” She was somewhat aware that this was probably a situation that would normally call for condolences or comforting, but she had none of that to give. Far easier to suggest actions, or take them herself.

“I can’t directly interact with the world in that way. Also the man who did this has...protection against me.”

“So you want me to kill him then.”

Her companion shook her head, still gazing out across the expanse. “Your actions are your own, Shaw. I can show you things, give you powers, but your choices belong to you. What I showed you tonight is an opportunity, a potential turning point, but whether you wish to pursue it is your decision alone.”

Shaw had never seen her look sad before and it annoyed her, though in a different way than her companion usually annoyed her. She wanted to hit someone. “What if I offered to kill him? I have no love for the Overseers. The more of them that’re dead, the safer I am.”

Her companion finally turned to look at her. “It’s your choice,” she repeated, but there was something about the way she looked at Shaw now that was a little softer than her words.

“Like I said, I have no love for the Overseers, and I guess I owe you one for getting me out of that damned jungle.”

Her companion smiled and it was like a bright ray of light slicing through the grey of the Void. She stepped up almost against Shaw and rested her hands on Shaw’s shoulders. She leaned in so close that Shaw could feel her breath on her lips and Shaw wondered what would happen if she closed that last little bit of distance between them, if she tangled her hands in her companion’s hair and pulled her against her.

“Thank you, Sameen.” Lips brushed against Shaw’s, too light to even be a kiss, and then her companion spoke again into Shaw's parted lips. “My name is Root.” Her mouth pressed into Shaw’s, hard, and teeth bit into Shaw’s lip and for a second Shaw felt a body pressed warm against her own, but then it was gone and she was left standing by herself in the empty building back in the real world with nothing but a bleeding lip to prove any of it had ever happened.

She ran her tongue over the cut on her mouth and made her way back to her corner to get ready to sleep for the rest of the night. She had a feeling she’d need a good night’s rest for whatever it was she’d just agreed to.


	3. Holger Square

It was raining when Shaw awoke the next morning, a steady downpour that she knew could go on for hours. The portion of roof that remained above her had shielded her from the worst of it overnight, but the wind blew occasional gusts in and her clothes felt damp and uncomfortable.

Hell of a way to start her first morning back in civilization.

The long coat she'd won in a card game on the pirate ship was treated with oil and as waterproof as it was possible to be, but it would still only help so much. The rain had left the steps and walls of the building slippery enough that she decided to play it safe and traversed to the ground floor with a quick twist of reality. It was disturbing how quickly she'd come to rely on her new powers despite how hard she tried to avoid using them. She suspected she still hadn't uncovered all her new abilities and her compa...Root hadn't been very forthcoming on the topic.

Rats scurried away into the shadows when she appeared on the ruined floor of the warehouse. It was odd seeing Dunwall rats again after the monstrosities in Pandyssia--the ones here were so much smaller and less murderous. The rumor was that the rat plague that had almost wiped out Dunwall when she'd been a kid had come from Pandyssia originally, and she was inclined to believe that based on what she'd seen.

She left the crumbling factory behind and headed down to the river, weaving her way between the early morning crowds. Now that it was lighter out she could spot the water lines on the buildings from where the flood waters had risen. There'd been an effort to paint over some of them, but even after all this time the scars remained.

There were vendors with carts out on the streets despite the early hour and she stopped to buy herself an apple tart and ate it as she walked, marvelling at her first taste of fresh baked food in far too long. She wanted a full, hot meal soon, but that could wait until after she did some scouting.

It was a long walk from the financial district upriver to Holger Square, and it had gone much faster the previous night in the Void, though whether it had just seemed that way or if the Void had provided them with a shortcut, she wasn't sure. Traversing might have been a bit too obvious in daylight (even heavily overcast and rainy daylight) and the electric rail cars were reserved for those wealthy enough to afford them which meant that she would be on foot the whole way. (Perhaps she could have gotten a ride on a boat, but she was planning to stay on solid ground for a good long while after her extended time at sea).

Despite the rain, it wasn't an unpleasant walk and the view of the boats on the Wrenhaven was very picturesque, other than for the trawlers with whales strung up in harnesses above their decks en route to the slaughterhouses (the sight filled her with unease). Still, there was a certain charm to having Dunwall's wood and brick buildings and grimy streets on one side of her and the river on the other.

She spared another glance at Dunwall tower as she passed by it on the opposite bank. Maybe sending an anonymous letter to the Empress wasn't out of the question. It wasn't so much that she was worried about more potential casualties as she was sure that the humans of the Isles weren't meant to walk Pandyssia. The rumor was that someone had deliberately brought the rat plague back to Dunwall, but she couldn't help but feel that whoever had done that had be allowed to do so by Pandyssia itself, possibly even encouraged. That Pandyssia had defended itself.

The sight of Kaldwin's bridge reminded her of her companion. Root. Shaw had a name for her now, and she'd agreed to some idiotic mission for who knows what reason. She must have gone briefly mad the previous night. Strange that there'd been no sign of Root this morning--Shaw had gotten used to get popping up every few hours to mock her before vanishing back into the Void.

“Shaw.”

The deep voice from behind her definitely wasn't Root's and she cursed at herself for letting Reese sneak up on her.

“You need something?” she asked as Reese fell into step next to her.

“Thought you could use a hand.” His expression was blank, but that was nothing unusual.

“What gave you that impression?”

Reese shrugged. “I'll leave if you tell me to.”

Shaw doubted that. They'd worked together for a span of years before she'd had to get out of the Isles, and she knew Reese well enough to know he'd probably keep tailing her anyway. He must have followed her last night without her realizing which proved she'd lost her edge for operating in a city during the last year.

“The thing I'm involved in, it might get messy.”

She took the slight twitch of Reese's mouth to be his utter contempt that she thought that would discourage him. Well, she'd warned him; anything that happened was on him now.

“What exactly are you involved in?” Reese asked. “Is it connected to whatever happened to your expedition?”

“No. Well, not exactly.” It was connected to Root who was connected to Pandyssia so in some sense he wasn't completely wrong.

“Glad we cleared that up,” Reese said with only the slightest hint of sarcasm bleeding into his voice.

“Hey, you invited yourself to this party. You got a problem, you can walk.”

Reese only chuckled. “Am I at least allowed to know where we're heading now?”

“Holger Square.”

She expected him to object or at least have more questions, but he just nodded and kept pace with her. It was sort of nice having someone she (mostly) trusted with her again, there to watch her back. They'd worked well together before she'd left--mercenary work and a lot of the vigilante shit that Reese got so fired up about. They'd both been on just about every side of every gang war over the years in some capacity and they'd even done some work for the city guard once. It hadn't been the cushiest life ever, but it had rarely been dull and Shaw would have been happy continuing in it if someone hadn't set the Overseers on her.

“You still running the same jobs we used to?” she asked as they turned away from the river to head through the streets.

“I try to keep busy.” Reese came to a halt. “And speaking of busy, let's go around the Distillery District. Some folks there might not be too keen to have me show up right now.”

“You always were the popular one,” Shaw said, steering them towards a different street. The layout of the city was coming back to her naturally.

They spent the rest of the walk in silence. Shaw flexed her left hand against the leather strap wrapped around it, wondering why the mark below hadn't given her any hint of Root being around yet. Was Root going to ignore her now that she was doing what she wanted? It would make sense in a pragmatic way, but somehow it didn't fit with Shaw's image of Root.

“Please tell me we're not actually going in there,” Reese said when they came to a halt across from the iron gates barring the entrance to Holger Square. In addition to the locked gates there was a small group of guards standing watch and one of those obnoxiously loud alarm devices that could draw the attention of half the guards in a district.

“Okay, I won't tell you.” She held back a smirk at his exasperated expression. “Does it strike you as odd that there's this much security for a place that's supposed to be empty?”

“Considering how much trouble the Overseers caused after the Empress dissolved the Abbey, I'm surprised there aren't more guards.”

Shaw was a little sad she'd missed that. It was a gutsy move on the Empress's part, shutting down an entire religious organization, especially since it was the only religious organization in the Isles and very wealthy and protected by the armed Overseers. It must have been a mess.

“I need you to distract the guards so I can slip by.”

Reese frowned. “You're going in there by yourself?”

She knew she was going to need to traverse to get where she was going and she wasn't quite ready to let Reese know about her mark yet, no matter how much she trusted him. Plus she was probably going to need to talk to Root and she definitely wasn't going to explain _that_ to him.

“If you want to help me, you're going to have to trust me on this one.”

Reese sighed. “Alright, Shaw, but if you get yourself captured by the guard--”

“You'll bust me out again.”

He nodded glumly. “I probably will. Okay, fine.”

Reese's distraction involved slipping on the cobblestones in front of the guards and then...flirting with the one who came to help him up. Shaw watched, amused, as Reese ingratiated himself with the first guard and then got invited over to chat with the rest. She wasn't sure how this was going to turn into a distraction until Reese started gesturing a lot as he told some story and turned to point away down towards the river. With all the guards thoroughly engaged in his story and looking the other way, he'd left her the perfect opening.

He'd probably expected her to have to climb over the fence (which would have been a nasty business with the spikes on top), but if there was ever a time and place to use her powers, this was it. A quick traversal and she was standing on the other side of the gate in a broad but deserted street that led down to the Office of the High Overseer. The Office itself was an imposing stone building that a year ago would have been swarming with armed Overseers, but now had only a small group of city guards in the massive front plaza who were trying to stay out of the rain as best they could.

It would have been only too easy to have taken the miserable and distracted guards down, but Shaw didn't want anyone knowing about her visit. Fortunately for her there was a wide ledge on the outside of the second floor which was easy enough to traverse up to. (Being able to teleport up the height of an entire story of a building was still something of a novelty for her and she enjoyed the slight moment of disorientation that followed as she settled on her new perch).

That was where her good luck ended, though, because all the windows were covered with metal shutters. She shoved at one but it wasn't budging. It must have weighed a ton. She huddled down on the wet ledge and looked out across the plaza for another way in.

“Need a hand?”

Root was sitting on the ledge next to her, legs dangling over the courtyard.

“Was wondering when you were going to show up.”

If there was anything wrong then it wasn't apparent from Root's expression now which was entirely too smug for Shaw's liking.

“Did you miss me?”

“No.” Even if she had spent most of the morning wondering where Root was, that didn't mean she'd _missed_ her. “But it's really coming down out here so if you've got some advice, let's hear it.”

The rain didn't seem to be bothering Root though since it was passing right through her, leaving her hair looking perfect and her habitual high-necked black jacket dry. Shaw wondered if it ever rained in the Void and how long it had actually been since Root had been forced to deal with the inconveniences of weather. It had rained a lot in Pandyssia and Shaw had gotten used to dealing with the annoyances of damp clothes and hair, but there it had seemed more natural. Getting rained on in the city was irritating.

“Do you know how you thread yourself in and out of the Void to travel, like you did to get up here?” Root asked.

Shaw hadn't been aware that was what she'd been doing, but put that way it made sense--traveling like a needle going in and out of cloth, or the Void in this case, to pop up somewhere else. It explained the cold rush of wind she felt every time, too.

“What about it? I need to be able to see where I'm going for that to work. I can't go through a solid shutter.”

“Hmm, well, that's certainly a limitation isn't it?” Root looked thoughtful. “Did you know that each person who is granted powers has them manifest in slightly different ways? Some of the marked couldn't have traveled through the gate like you did a moment ago.”

That sounded like an annoying limitation. “Glad you gave me the superior ones then.”

“It's not really up to me which ones you get.”

Shaw definitely wanted to hear about that, but even more she wanted to be out of the damn rain. “How do I get inside then?”

“Well, when you want to move somewhere you pull yourself through the Void, but let's say you wanted to move something else instead.”

“Like a metal shutter. What, do I push it into the Void or something?”

“Sameen! That would be littering!”

Shaw couldn't tell if the offended look on Root's face was a joke or not.

“What the hell am I supposed to do with it then?”

Root's lower lip was stuck out in a pout and Shaw considered shoving her off the ledge (the fact Root was incorporeal was the only thing that stopped her). It was still raining down buckets and she was drenched and angry and technically doing Root a _favor_ here. Of course it had been all sad mopey Root last night before Shaw had agreed, but now it was back to this nonsense.

“Root, you have five seconds to tell me how the hell to get rid of the shutter and then I'm leaving and you can kill this asshole yourself.”

The pouting grew more pronounced, but Root let out a long sigh and relented. “Fine. You have to swap it with something else. Think of it like...a balance scale almost.”

“Uhhh.” Shaw looked around the area, trying to find something she could potentially use to swap. There were some wooden crates down below, but she wasn't sure what was in them and the guard patrolling the perimeter was close enough now that he might notice if one vanished. “Do the weights have to be the same?”

“In the same range, but there's a very large margin of error. Things might reappear a little off the mark to compensate.”

“Right. No problem,” she said with confidence that belied the fact she didn't have a single clue what to do next.

The first time she'd traversed with her power she hadn't understood what she was doing at all. Root had told her she could, and she'd done it without thinking it through. This was a little trickier, but she figured not over-thinking it was still key. So if the shutter and the thing she wanted to swap it with were on opposite sides of a circle, like a wheel maybe, and she just gave the wheel a spin….

There was a twist of motion in front of her and the shutter vanished and was replaced by a soggy, shocked guardsman standing just inside the window with his back to her. There was a distant thud of the metal shutter hitting the ground below. Shaw tapped the guard on the shoulder and, when he spun around in confusion, decked him in the face.

She ducked in the window and landed on the wooden floorboards next to the unconscious man.

“That wasn't quite what I imagined you were going to do.” Root had followed her in.

“Yeah, well, guess you don't know everything after all.”

“Oh, trust me, I'm not complaining.” It was hard to tell with those solid black eyes, but Shaw thought Root might be impressed. Her voice had definitely sounded a little deeper. She stalked across the floor towards Shaw and Shaw had to remind herself that Root couldn't actually touch her here. Root stopped, inches away and peered down at her. Shaw had avoided thinking about that kiss from last night until now. The first time Root had kissed her, Shaw had been delirious, and it had seemed like part of some dream, but last night had been very real and very deliberate. What the hell was Root playing at?

“You're definitely the most fascinating person I've given my mark to, Sameen Shaw.”

“The Outsider has been gone only a few months. Have you even had time to give your mark to that many people?”

The pout came back and Root stepped away. “You're not any fun today.”

“Probably because I just spent fifteen minutes stuck in the rain arguing with you. Now, can you point me in the right direction?”

The pout vanished and Root's expression was all business again. “I think I've given you quite enough help for one day. Can't play favorites, after all.”

And she promptly vanished before Shaw could even begin to dissect how ludicrous all of that statement had been.

“Fuck you,” she muttered at the empty hallway. It was a far from satisfying comeback.

She squeezed as much water as she could out of her shirt tail and tried to refocus on the task at hand. Those rips she'd seen in the Void last night had been somewhere inside this building, but where exactly she wasn't sure. High up, she thought, since they'd been hovering well above the ground level. There were only the two levels here, though the ceilings were quite high, so maybe there was somewhere with an elevated platform or high shelves or something.

The plaque next to the door nearest to her declared the room as the archives, and she figured if anywhere would have shelves, that would be the place. The door was locked, but a swift and powerful kick shattered the lock and threw the doors wide open.

It had clearly been ransacked, though whether by the Empress's guards or the fleeing Overseers there was no way to tell. The tall shelves were mostly bare, and ruined books were scattered on the floors. There was a second level up a small flight of stairs which took up half the room, and Shaw knew she was in the right spot the second she got to the top. There was something deeply _wrong_ here that made her stomach feel unsettled and her skin crawl. It took her a minute to find visible evidence of the problem since it was almost impossible to see. There, on the back wall, was a spot that looked slightly different, like it was darker somehow, heavier. It was difficult to see unless she moved her head and saw the way the light failed to move across it. She moved in closer to examine it, ignoring the overwhelming feeling that she should get as far away as possible. She reached out with one hand to touch it and pain burned across the back of her left hand. She staggered back a few steps clutching her hand and staring at the brand burning with blue fire on her skin.

“What the fuck is that thing?” she asked, but there was no response. Gathering herself, she swiftly searched the rest of the archive in the hopes of finding any sort of clue as to what might have caused the weird tear, but whoever had looted the place had been thorough.

Voices from down the hall alerted her to the presence of someone else in the building and she ducked back out into the hallway and peered cautiously around the corner. There were guards down by the window she'd come in through, trying to wake up the unconscious man. It was her own fault, really--she'd gone for the flashy move (she blamed Root for that) and drawn attention to herself. Oh well, at least it had been fun.

She ended up slipping out an unshuttered back window into the yard behind the building. There was an entire complex of buildings back here which she hadn't been aware existed at all. A few traversals across the low roofs and some peeking through the windows gave her the impression that many of these buildings had been used for research or crafting though they had all been stripped of anything useful. When the Empress had shut down the Office, she'd robbed the Overseers of more than just their headquarters.

Shaw dropped back down to the ground and headed for the river which ran directly behind the compound. She wasn't sure what drew her attention to the shattered window at ground level on the side of one of the larger buildings, but she hunkered down to peek inside and then traversed into the small basement room to take a closer look.

There was a metal jail cell with mildewed mattresses along one wall and one of those ugly masks the Overseers all wore on an otherwise empty table. The door to the cell was open and there wasn't much left in there, but a bit of color caught her eye. Half-hidden under a mattress was a child's toy, a stuffed dog that vaguely resembled a wolf hound. Her fingers tightened around it as she realized what this place must have been.

Of course everyone had heard rumors of the Overseers stealing children to induct into their order, but few really believed it. She'd been lucky that her mother had found out the Overseers were watching her when she was just a child and had left Dunwall for Fraeport to start a new life with a new name. If her mother hadn't done that, Shaw might have ended up right here.

She stared at the empty eyes and twisted sneer on the thin bronze of the Overseer’s mask on the table. She took the mask with her when she left and pitched it into the muddy waters of the Wrenhaven on her way out the back of the compound.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I might start posting twice a week because I have zero patience.


	4. Coldridge Prison

The hot meal had been worth waiting for, especially since Reese had offered to pay Shaw's tab. She was halfway done with a generous slab of blood ox steak before Reese finally switched the topic from food to Shaw's little errand from that morning.

“I've got a standing invitation to three separate gatherings for Fugue Feast, so I suppose it wasn't a total waste of my time.”

Shaw ignored Reese's baffling popularity and focused on the more troubling question his story raised. “How can Fugue Feast still happen without the Overseers?”

The stretch of days that came after the end of the current calendar year and before the beginning of the next was presided over by the Overseers, and historically they'd been the ones to declare it over and the new year begun based on...whatever the hell the Overseers based that sort of nonsense on. Without them, who would be declaring the start of the new year? The Empress?

“Good question. No one seems to have a clear answer, but the Empress would be mad to try and stop the Feast. It's usually extremely good for the local businesses and there'd be riots if it were cancelled.”

Shaw had participated in some of the frivolity of Fugue Feast a couple times over the years. Everyone in the city wore masks and parties poured out into the streets for the span of days when people could not be held accountable for any actions they took. Mostly it involved violations of the Abbey's precious Seven Scriptures--from orgies and drunkenness to burglary and violence all across the city--but sometimes things got more out of hand and there were bodies in the streets come the start of the new year.

“Well, that should be interesting.” Maybe she should follow the example of the nobles and leave town for the country until it had ended, though she had to admit she was curious.

“That's an understatement.”

Reese pushed his almost untouched plate across the table to her and she slid her empty one aside to make room. She suspected she was being bribed with food, though she couldn't say she minded much at the moment.

“I'm after a former Overseer,” she said after she was a few bites into the second steak. “Don't know much about him other than that he's into some really bad magic shit. Or was. I don't even know if he's still alive for sure.” Though Root had seemed to think he was and she should know.

“Magic shit? Doesn't sound like something the Overseers would approve of, not that they ever had any trouble being hypocritical when it suited them.”

“Yeah, well, maybe this guy's work wasn't officially sanctioned. He was messing with the fabric of the Void somehow, trying to tear it apart I think.” She thought about that heavy, dark tear in the archive, how it had made the mark on her hand burn.

“That doesn't sound like a great idea,” Reese agreed, dryly. “How'd you find out about this?”

“Tip from a source.” She expected Reese to question how she'd found a source less than a day back into the city, but he passed it by for a question she wanted to answer even less.

“Why would you care about some Overseer anyway? Someone offer you a bounty on this guy?”

She thought about Root and about how distressed she'd looked last night and that goddamned kiss. “No money in it that I know of, but let's just say I have a vested interest in finding out what this guy was up to.”

Reese watched as she polished off the second steak. “How are you planning to keep up your expensive eating habits in the meantime? I heard that ship you came in on didn't make much coin this trip. The whale they were hauling in died on the way back and rotted before it got to the slaughterhouse. A huge loss considering how much harder it is to find whales lately and the restrictions on whale oil usage because of it.”

Reese had apparently been looking into her journey back. She didn't mind, but she didn't want to explain how an experienced crew had ended up with a dead whale on board when they'd been supposed to bring it to the slaughterhouse alive. Better if no one ever knew about her involvement in putting the beast out of its misery. (Except that of course Root already knew. Come to think of it, that was right about when she'd started spending more time in Shaw's presence).

She hadn't really thought of it in terms of the whale oil shortages that the Isles were all facing, and one less whale to drain in the face of the larger problem of how the Empire would power anything when it ran out of whale oil for good was practically nothing.

“Didn't really have a plan, though I picked up some odds and ends in the Office today that should fetch a decent price.” It would see her through the week at least.

“Might be I could find some work for us, like old times.”

It felt odd to imagine going back to her old life as if nothing had happened, but she wasn't sure what else she could do. “Yeah, that might be good.”

Reese must have sensed it was an uncomfortable topic because he didn't press further. “This Overseer, you have a name for him? Anything at all to go on?”

“Not a damn thing. I was thinking of hunting down some former Overseers who'd escaped the Empress and seeing if they could point me in the right direction.” It wasn't much of a plan, but if this guy had really been into some dangerous stuff then someone must have known.

“I know where some of the former Overseers are, but they might not be easy to get to.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Empress has a whole bunch of them locked up in Coldridge prison.”

Shaw wasn't crazy about breaking into Coldridge again, but at least it was always entertaining. “Sounds like I should get my hands on some supplies for this.”

Reese regarded her silently for a second and then said, “I might have a better way in.”

* * *

 

It went against everything Shaw stood for to enter Coldridge prison legally and as an official visitor. Well, mostly legally. Technically she and Reese were criminals who'd broken in and out of the prison several times.

“We're even after this,” the guard leading them past the security post hissed at Reese. “It's my ass on the line here, you know.”

“Relax, Lionel, we'll be gone before you know it.” Reese's reassuring smile was not actually very reassuring.

It was quiet in the main cell block, something that had surprised Shaw until the time she'd been briefly held in a cell there and she'd seen exactly what the guards did to noisy prisoners. The silent intensity of the prisoners who watched them walk by was a bit creepy, but Shaw understood it. She hadn't enjoyed her stay there at all.

“We've got five of these guys left here,” their escort, a guard named Lionel Fusco, said as they headed up a set of stairs. “Not sure why you'd want to talk to them. They're the least interesting guys in this place.”

Fusco, Reese had told her, had been part of a special group of guards called Dead Counters back during the rat plague when Reese had first met him, responsible for handling plague victims and seizing the houses of the infected. They'd all been fairly corrupt from what Shaw knew--stealing from the abandoned houses and even evicting people in good health to take their valuables--and Reese had blackmailed Fusco or something along those lines and now, somehow, they were friends of a sort.

“This guy is the most talkative of the lot, not that that's saying much.” Fusco stopped in front of a cell. “Most of them spent the first few weeks yapping about how we were all doomed to wander the Void forever for treating them like this, but once the news of Whitecliff made the rounds here, they got real quiet.”

Whitecliff had been one of the main strongholds of the Overseers. Shaw wasn't sure what had happened there, but she could guess. The Overseers had been wealthy and powerful, but the Empress had a lot more troops than they did, especially if she'd called in the navy.

The man in the cell sat up on the edge of his cot and eyed them suspiciously. It was hard to think of someone as an Overseer without the metal mask, but Shaw could see the arrogance in his eyes.

“These two have some questions for you,” Fusco told the prisoner. “You tell them what they need to know and maybe you'll get some extra bread on your tray today.”

The prisoner scoffed at the offer but came over to the bars.

“We're looking for a former Overseer,” Shaw said. “Would have been stationed here in Dunwall at the Office of the High Overseer, probably a bit nuts, and into some really bad shit.”

The former Overseer shrugged, bored. “That's not much to go on.”

At least he admitted all the Overseers were a bit nuts.

Shaw glanced sideways at Fusco before continuing. She didn't want to say too much in front of him, but she didn't have a choice. “This guy would have been messing around with the Void in a bad way. Trying to rip a hole in it or something dumb like that.”

The former Overseer scowled. “That would be heresy and madness. No Overseer would do such a thing.” He paused. “Or rather most would not.”

“You have a name for us?” Shaw prompted.

“No, but perhaps you should speak to Brother Jacob. Just do not tell him I sent you.”

“Figures it'd be the weird, silent one,” Fusco grumbled. “Let's go.”

“Weird silent one?” Reese asked as they headed up another level of stairs.

“Yeah, at first I thought ‘Brother’ Jacob must have outranked the others we've got here since they all seem to defer to him, but I figured out they're all just scared shitless of the guy. He's real quiet and has creepy eyes like he can see inside you. If you'd told me this involved some weird occult shit I would have taken you right to him, which, by the way, what the hell are you two involved in?”

“It's complicated,” Shaw said before Reese could explain.

The row of cells on the top floor were mostly empty and Brother Jacob's was all the way at the end. He was sitting on his bunk reading a book and barely looked up when they arrived.

“Hey, Brother Weirdo, you've got visitors.”

From what Shaw could see of Brother Jacob, he was an older man with black hair that had mostly gone grey. He looked like somebody's grandfather and not at all like a dangerous fanatic.

“I know who you are,” he said without closing his book or sparing them a glance. “Though I'm surprised to see you seeking us out of your own volition, Sameen Shaw.”

Shaw almost reached for the knife she'd concealed under her coat, but caught herself in time.

“You know this guy?” Fusco asked.

“Can't say I do.” There was only one way he'd know who she was. “Think he must have been part of the reason I had to take that trip last year.” She glanced at Reese to make sure he followed her line of thought. The Overseers didn't like it when children they'd picked out to induct into their ranks vanished before they could get to them, and while they wouldn't launch an Empire-wide hunt for them, they definitely would take an interest if one turned up, even years later. Shaw wasn't sure who had tipped off the Overseers as to who she was, but once they'd known she was in Dunwall her options had been limited.

Brother Jacob shut his book and looked up at her and she could see what Fusco had meant about his creepy eyes. “I remember when we first noted you, child. Quiet, controlled, remorseless. You were everything we could have looked for in an Overseer. We don't take women into our ranks often, except for the Oracular Sisters, of course, but you...we had such high hopes for you.”

“Tough luck for you then.”

“Indeed.” Brother Jacob stood up from his cot and walked closer to the bars of the cell. “May I ask what brings you here?”

“We're looking for another former Overseer. Stationed in Dunwall, had a thing for trying to rip holes in the Void. Sound familiar?”

Something flickered in Brother Jacob's eyes, but he gave no other visible reaction. “Perhaps I know who you mean. What is the information worth to you?”

“Careful with this one, Shaw,” said a quiet and familiar voice by her ear.

Shaw made a point of not looking behind her to see if she could actually see Root. Even if she could, no one else must be able to since she figured even the very composed Brother Jacob would have reacted to Root appearing behind her, especially with those solid black eyes she had.

She was slightly offended; did Root think she couldn't tell this guy was bad news? Also what had happened to the whole staying neutral thing?

“Why don't you tell us what you want?” Reese asked.

Brother Jacob smiled. “Perhaps you should send your guard friend away for a moment.”

“Nice try, bud, but I'm not budging.”

“Fusco.” There was the slightest hint of a threat in Reese's voice.

Fusco deflated a bit. “Fine, but I'm standing at the end of the row by the alarm. You guys try to bust him out and I'll have every guard in the place here in seconds.”

“Busting him out is definitely not on the table,” Shaw said. Though if he was out of jail then she could kill him much more easily, which was an appealing thought.

“Nothing so dramatic as that,” Brother Jacob assured her as Fusco retreated. “I merely require you to retrieve a certain item for me and turn it over to an associate of mine. Once he has it I'll tell you everything you need to know about this Overseer you seek, including where to find him.”

“Sounds too easy. What's the catch?”

“Ah, the catch.” Brother Jacob steepled his hands together in front of him. “It's in a very secure vault. You see, it was one of the things the Empress confiscated when she disbanded the Abbey.”

“There's a lot of things she took that it would be better to leave locked away forever,” Root said from behind her. “The Overseers had so much money to pour into research and most of the things they came up with weren't aimed at helping people. Though perhaps you could find other...useful things in there as well, especially if helping people isn't your goal.”

Shaw tucked all that away to think over later on. It was really unfair of Root to drop tidbits like that while Shaw couldn't respond to her, but maybe that had been intentional on her part.

“What's the item you're looking for?” she asked Brother Jacob.

“A knife, a very small one made of whalebone and covered in carvings. I believe you'll know it when you see it.”

“And what's so special about it?”

Brother Jacob only smiled.

Reese took a step back from the door and motioned for her to follow.

“I don't like this. No way this knife is some innocuous artifact. This guy is an Overseer to the core and he's plotting something and that knife is part of it.”

“Think you're right, but do we really have another choice here?” She waited to see if Root would step in with a suggestion, but there was no comment from behind her.

“You really need to find this guy that badly?” Reese asked.

Shaw might have walked away from this before she'd seen those tears in the archives earlier, but she couldn't do nothing about that. If someone was really ripping the Void apart then that put her in danger, too, and everyone on the very short list of people she cared about.

“Yeah, I guess I do.” She turned back to Brother Jacob. “Do you at least know where it's being held?”

“The Empress had a great vault constructed under Dunwall tower for the express purpose of holding all the Overseer artifacts.”

“Always did want to break into the tower,” Shaw said thoughtfully. Maybe the Empress kept other valuables down there, too. She could solve the problem of her lack of coin at the same time. “Yeah, okay, we'll do it. But after--” She stepped forwards so she was standing right at the bars looking dead into Brother Jacob's eyes. “--you're going to give us that name or what I do to you will be so terrible that even your seven scriptures wouldn't cover it. We clear?”

She took satisfaction in the tiny half-step back Brother Jacob took.

“Very clear.”

Brother Jacob didn't speak again until she was walking away, down the row towards where Fusco waited.

“It really was a shame you were hidden from us all those years ago, child. You could have accomplished such great things in the order.”

Shaw stiffened and looked back over her shoulder. “Looks like your great things didn't turn out so well for you, Brother, because from where I'm standing only one of us is locked up in a cage.”

She started walking again, and, if he responded, she didn't hear it.

* * *

 

“Did it bother you, seeing where all the other children were held?”

Shaw blinked, disoriented. Where the hell was she?

Root's face popped into view in front of her. “The ones the Overseers had abducted and locked up in a cage.”

“Not really,” Shaw said, looking around and trying to get a grip on her situation. Everything was shimmering and rippling here, the world splintered into odd angles like a broken mirror. Clearly this was the Void, but how had she gotten here? “Am I asleep?”

“Does it matter?”

Shaw struggled to her feet, unsteady in the constantly warping world. “Yes, it fucking matters. If I'm asleep then only my mind is here and there's no way for me to wake up if someone comes after me.” Dreams were a way to partially enter the Void. Her body must still be back where she'd fallen asleep.

Root tilted her head to one side and a thousand splintered reflections of her did the same all around them. “I'd wake you up if there was any real danger. Keeping you trapped here while someone killed you on the other side would be cheating.”

“Forgive me if I don't find that reassuring.”

“Don't you trust me, Sameen?” Root's smile reflected back at Shaw from every angle.

“No.”

“Hmph, fine. Have it your way.”

Root waved a hand and Shaw sat up with a start back in the ruined building in the financial district where she was sleeping again. Her knife was out and ready before she was fully awake.

“Better?” Root perched on the remains of a brick wall a few feet away, watching her.

“What the hell do you want?” Shaw growled at her.

“Just checking in on you, sweetie.”

“Couldn't that have waited until I woke up?” Or Root could have stopped by during the hour Shaw had put off sleeping and lounged around the abandoned building in case Root decided to stop by and chat about all the new developments (not that Shaw was willing to tell Root that she'd waited up for her).

“I'm a busy person, Shaw. It's not like you're the only human I have to keep an eye on.”

Shaw put her knife away, resigned to whatever this nonsense was continuing for the time being. “Fine, you're here now. Let's talk about this knife that Brother Jacob wants me to steal. I'm guessing you know what it is?”

Root shook her head. “Not a clue.”

“Thought you knew everything.”

“Almost everything, and this is one of the things I don't know enough about, not unlike the man you're trying to find. Curious, isn't it?”

“Is there _anything_ useful you can tell me about any of this?”

“I can tell you that you may very well regret making a deal with Brother Jacob, but--” She held up a hand to stop Shaw's half-formed retort. “--I also agree that it was the only clear path forwards. And I'm not ungrateful that you're going through with this to help us.”

“Us?”

Root hopped off her wall and spun around in a small circle. “The Void. Whatever your motives, you're currently helping to protect it.” She walked over to stand in front of where Shaw sat, making Shaw crane her neck to look up at her. “When the Outsider granted his mark to humans it was because they were meant to play a role in the events of your world, and while the effects of their actions rippled back into the Void, they weren't directly changing the Void itself. Well--” Root pursed her lips as if she'd just thought of something amusing. “--one of them did, but that's complicated.”

“You're saying I got powers because I'm supposed to, what? Play a role in the events of the Void?”

“Close enough.”

Shaw felt exhausted for reasons that went well beyond the fact she was awake in the middle of the night. All she'd wanted back on Pandyssia was to come home and sleep for a month, not dive right into a new mess. Maybe she should have stayed there--waking dreams and strange monsters were easier to deal with than this nonsense.

“Why me?”

“Maybe the Void just liked you.”

Shaw narrowed her eyes. “The Void is neutral, unlike certain of its denizens.” She almost pulled her knife again when Root folded at the knees and plopped herself into Shaw's lap, her arms coming up to circle around Shaw's neck.

“Well then maybe I just liked you,” Root purred.

Shaw's hands moved automatically to steady Root, resting on her hips. Root's face was inches away from hers yet again and there were definitely some things that needed to be cleared up here before this nonsense went any further and well maybe that could wait a few seconds because Root's mouth was on hers and her fingers were digging into the back of Shaw's neck as she tried to pull then even tighter together and Shaw could feel the warmth radiating off of her from where they were pressed together and--

Shaw pulled back, sharply. “What the hell, Root?”

Root didn't budge and smiled down at her lazily. “Something wrong?”

Shaw prodded her hard in the chest with a single finger. “If I can touch you then we're still in the Void. I thought you woke me up?”

“Oh, you're awake. And as to where we are, let's say we're somewhere in between.”

Shaw looked around at the parts of the world she could see that weren't obscured by Root sitting in her lap. Everything looked normal, except, yes, there was a wall over there, part of the ruined building, that flickered out of existence every few seconds. Down on the street she could see a lamp post doing the same.

“Your world and mine are laid one over top of the other, Shaw. Some people can see into both worlds at once with certain powers or artifacts and that lets them interact with both as well. We're still in your world but you can see into the Void just enough for things to get a little more...physical.”

Shaw turned back to look at Root closely. Her face was flushed and her lips were slightly parted. If it hadn't been for those pitch black eyes of hers Shaw could have believed that Root was a normal woman, here just for her.

“The thing about the Void--”

Shaw cut off whatever unnecessarily cryptic nonsense was about to come out of Root's mouth by grabbing her by the collar of her black jacket and pulling her back down for another kiss. This, she decided, was way better than having Root spout riddles at her all night.

She tightened her grip on Root's hips and flipped them so Root landed on her back on Shaw's coat and Shaw hovered above her. Root let out a surprised gasp when her back hit the ground and Shaw smirked, pleased to have gotten the drop on her for once. She looked Root over, trying to figure out what she wanted to do next. The coat? Yeah, the coat had to go.

Root was only too happy to help her yank open her coat but Shaw only let Root pull it part way down her arms before she pressed Root back down to the floor, trapping her arms at her sides. Root was wearing some type of sleeveless shirt underneath, though the entire outfit seemed vague in a way Shaw could only attribute to the Void, as if it was more a suggestion of clothing than actual garments which probably would have been a really interesting observation if she didn't now have a great view of Root's neck and collarbones and Root wasn't shifting beneath her in a very distracting way.

A sudden thought occurred to her as she leaned down to explore Root's neck with her mouth, feeling a small thrill of excitement at the way Root angled her head to give her better access. Yeah, Root was definitely into this for more than just seducing Shaw, if that's what this was all about anyway. She sucked a harsh mark into the side of Root's neck, enjoying the way Root's fingers clutched at her back to keep her close. Whatever Root was or wasn't she was definitely still reacting like a human, and, Shaw noted with satisfaction as she pulled back and examined the patch of reddened skin she'd left on Root's neck, could get marked up like one too. Seemed fair that Shaw should mark her after Root had branded her hand, turnabout being fair play and all.

Root sat up, making Shaw back up a little. Shaw leaned back in, but was stopped by Root placing a hand on her chest. “Wait.”

“Wait?” she repeated, dumbly, still staring at Root's lips.

“I've got some good news and some bad news for you.”

“Right now? Really?”

“Unfortunately. The bad news is I need to be somewhere else right now, but the good news is that this is definitely to be continued at a later date.”

“Can't you be late to whatever it is? Thought you were all-powerful or something.” She tried again to lean back in but Root's hand held firm.

“The Void is the one with the power. Not me. And I really do have to go.” She dropped her hand though and didn't stop Shaw this time when she pressed their lips together for another deep, sliding kiss. Shaw grinned against Root's mouth when she gave a tiny whimper into the kiss. She could absolutely get her to stay.

“Sorry, sweetie,” Root breathed into her mouth. And then she was gone, vanished in a puff of Void smoke, leaving Shaw kneeling on her own coat, alone in the ruined building and very much back in the real world.

“ _Fuck_ ,” Shaw said with a lot of feeling. She glared at a rat scratching in the far corner. “What're you looking at?” The rat ignored her and she let out a defeated sigh.

“Might as well get some sleep, I guess,” she said in the general direction of the oblivious rodent. She had a big day tomorrow after all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I debated making the bad guys some of the samaritan crew from the show, but it felt like they didn't quite fit.
> 
> i'm going to try posting twice a week now on saturdays and tuesdays.


	5. Underworld Contacts

Shaw was still shocked that Reese had come up with a plan that didn't involve charging into the tower vault and worrying about the consequences later. He seemed a bit calmer than he'd been before she'd left for Pandyssia--like he'd finally gotten some of the itch to cause unneeded mayhem out of his system--and while she wasn't crazy about his plan, she had to admit that she didn't have a better one.

The back alley where they were meeting with Reese's source felt familiar to Shaw. Making deals with gangs in sketchy locales was just like old times, a glimpse of her former life. She was starting to think she hadn't missed it as much as she'd thought she had.

“Why are they called the Rat Catchers?” she asked Reese as they waited.

“That's what they do. Or used to do. There was a bounty paid on dead rats during the plague that persisted until recently. Empress lowered the reward per rat substantially just after you left and suddenly all these people who made a living killing rats needed a new source of income. They ended up forming into a gang under one of the more ambitious rat catchers. Mostly involved in smuggling and fencing stuff now. Some light robbery.”

“Guess that's one way to unionize,” Shaw said.

She’d gotten good at controlling her reactions to Root suddenly appearing out of nowhere but she still almost went for her knife when Root materialized in the alley on top of a stack of crates across from her.

“The rat catchers all protested the cut rewards, but the Empress refused to hear their case,” Root said. Shaw glanced at Reese but he seemed oblivious to Root's presence.

“Of course, a lot of them were secretly breeding rats so they could kill them and collect the reward,” Root continued. “Very enterprising of them.”

It was, but breeding rats after the plague had killed so many people didn't seem like the best idea to Shaw. It was interesting that Root had shown up here for this meeting though. Shaw hadn't expected to see her around while she was still working with Reese and yet here she was, imparting commentary and looking smug as shit for some reason.

She tried to subtly inspect Root's neck for the mark she'd left there the night before, but the high collar of Root's jacket defeated her. It wasn't _only_ that she was interested in seeing her own handiwork, she was also curious if Root's physical form was constant or if her corporeal body only formed when she needed it (which Shaw assumed would negate things like bruises). Root must have caught her looking because she smirked and waggled her eyebrows at Shaw in what had to be the least suave and otherworldly gesture Shaw had ever witnessed.

She rolled her eyes and turned back to Reese.

“Where's the Rat Catchers’ territory at?”

“The sewers, which is where they were hunting rats mostly anyway. That's also why they're most likely to have the information we're after.”

Shaw straightened up from the wall she'd been leaning on when three men entered the alley. She didn't recognize any of them, but that was hardly surprising given the death rate among gangs and the amount of time she'd been gone for. She'd bet good money that more than half the gang members she'd known before were dead or rotting in prison now.

“Good to see you again, John,” said the man that Shaw had picked out as the leader. “I hear you're looking for some information?”

“I figured it was about time I called in that favor you owed me, Elias.”

“I was wondering when you'd get around to that.” Elias looked past Reese at Shaw. “And who's your friend?”

“She's--”

“None of your concern,” Shaw finished. She didn't want her name getting thrown around the city just yet. Let everyone go right on thinking that Sameen Shaw was dead and gone.

“She's a friend,” Reese said, placatingly. “And I can vouch that she's trustworthy.”

Shaw wasn't sure she would have given Reese the same benefit of the doubt if their positions had been reversed (especially not with all the gaping holes in her story), but Reese seemed to have faith in her for some weird reason.

Elias looked at her with curiosity and Shaw glared back at him until he finally turned away with a shrug. “What did you have in mind, John? You know what I usually trade in and I can't quite see what use you'd have for whale oil unless you've switched professions recently.”

Whale oil? Shaw felt like she was missing something.

“When the Empress took away their rat killing money they found a way to get back at her and earn good money while doing so,” Root said from the top of her crates. Shaw had almost forgotten she was up there. It was nice to have her fill in the gaps, but annoying that she'd done it almost like she'd sensed Shaw's confusion or could read her mind.

“They steal and smuggle whale oil now,” Root continued. “Quite lucrative given the shortage. Also incredibly dangerous between how closely guarded all the reserves of it are and how volatile a substance it is. One slip and everyone goes boom.”

She winked at Shaw on the word 'boom’ and Shaw rolled her eyes _again_. How could the embodiment of the Void be such a loser?

“We're not after oil,” Reese said. “We're looking for information about the vault under the tower.”

Elias raised his eyebrows. “Are you taking up bank robbing now?” He sounded amused.

Shaw snorted quietly. As if she and Reese hadn't robbed a bank before.

“We need a way in, or at least the start of a way in,” Reese said. “What we do once we're inside is our own concern.”

“And why would you think I know a way in?”

“Because the vault is underground and they tore up the sewers all around the tower to expand the lower levels for it. No one knows the sewers better than your lot.”

“That they did,” Elias agreed. “Made a huge mess of it, too. Perhaps I know a way in to the tower basements, but the vault itself I'm afraid I don't know much about. I'm not sure anyone does other than her majesty and the men who built it.”

“We'll take the way in as the favor owed then.”

Elias nodded thoughtfully. “That seems like a fair repayment for your assistance, although there is one other thing I'd ask before I give you this.”

Shaw had been waiting for this part. There was always a catch, wasn't there? Everyone wanted something.

“I want the first opportunity to buy any goods you come out of there with. Let me take my pick before you hit the black market. I'll pay you well.”

“Not sure if we're going to be picking up much while we're there, but anything we get that we're willing to sell, you can have first choice on,” Reese agreed.

It could have been a much worse deal, Shaw figured. This Elias seemed like a businessman. That must have been part of why he'd ended up in charge of the Rat Catchers.

“Meet us back here at sunset and we'll show you the way in,” Elias said. He looked over at Shaw once more before he left and she could almost see the gears turning in his mind as he tried to fit her into the whole mystery of why they'd want to break into the tower vault. If he asked around about Reese's former partners he was likely to be able to figure out who she was on his own, but would he tell anyone or try to use it against her?

“Carl Elias could be much more than a gang leader,” Root observed from her perch. “He has so much potential and it would be easy to give him that last little push to turn into something greater and more dangerous.” She tilted her head to grin at Shaw. “Fun, right?”

While Shaw's definition of fun didn't often overlap with what was permissible by the law, she still suspected that it was a lot saner than Root's definition.

“Told you he could help,” Reese said once Elias was gone. “Now we just have to sort out the inside of the vault.”

“I think I know someone who can help us with that. If they’re still around.” Shaw hadn't checked on any of her former contacts yet.

“You were holding out on me, Shaw?”

“You expect me to believe you didn't have fences and sources that you didn't tell me about?”

Reese chuckled. “I'm glad you're not dead.”

Shaw felt a stab of awkwardness that was made worse by Root clapping her hands together and pronouncing, “Oh, that is so _sweet_!”

Shaw made a note to herself to punch Root in her annoying face as soon as it became punchable again.

“I'll just go see them and meet up with you later, okay?” she said. She'd been back less than a week and she already missed the solitude of dying slowly in a jungle.

* * *

 

The black market had grown a lot in Dunwall since Shaw left--an expansion of the ring of traders that had done so well in the southern city of Karnaca--but there'd always been a smattering of very well-connected fences and merchants who had no problem with buying and selling goods of all sorts. Shaw had done business with quite a few over the years, but when she wanted to find some really elusive bit of information that no one else even knew existed, there was only one person she bothered to ask.

Which was why she was sitting in a dumpster in Slaughterhouse Row, trying very hard not to breath too much due to the overwhelming stench of both the dumpster and the whole district.

“As delighted as I am to have you to myself again, I must admit I'm a bit perplexed by your choice of location for our outing.” Root looked down at her from where she sat daintily on the rim of the dumpster.

“This isn't an...outing. I'm on a mission here. Be quiet.”

She'd left the marks in every single location she knew that her contact had ever used in the hopes that they still checked one of them and now she had to sit here and wait to see if anyone got her message. Out of the three places to wait after leaving a sign this was probably the least pleasant, but also the least likely to attract outside attention. No one wanted to be anywhere near the waste produced by the whale slaughterhouses.

“Every month another slaughterhouse goes out of business now. One day they'll all close for good.” There was something in Root's voice that Shaw thought sounded like satisfaction. Vindictive satisfaction.

“The Isles are in for a shit time when that happens,” Shaw said. She tried to stretch her legs without actually touching anything else in the dumpster. “We could definitely do without the damned security murder devices they power with the oil, but without the manufacturing shops and the rail cars for transporting goods and equipment it'll be rough for everyone.”

At least the whales might get a break then, if there were any left. Shaw had heard stories of whales many times before her brief stint on the trawler and half the time they'd been painted as serene and gentle giants and the other half as savage killers. Her own experiences had led her to believe that both were probably true and how humans experienced them was based solely on if they'd shown up to kill the whales or not. Shaw couldn't blame any animal for fighting for its life with everything it had.

“There's got to be something else we can use instead,” she said. “If the Empress has half a brain in her head she's throwing all her money into finding an alternative.”

Root shrugged. “They say the great minds of the Academy of Natural Philosophy have been working on possible replacements, but so far nothing has been as efficient and so your Empire's veins still run with the blood of the leviathans.”

Shaw could have used more of flirty and inappropriate Root and less of dark and speculative Root right now, but even listening to her recite the coming doom of humanity was better than sitting here in silence. And Root had been very open with information today, so maybe Shaw could use that to her advantage.

“Can I ask you something?”

“You can ask, Shaw. I can't promise I'll answer.”

“When I'm in the Void with you, or seeing partway in like last night, you...feel physical to me.”

The look Root was giving her could only be called a leer. “You want to know if my body you can touch in the Void is real?”

“Basically, yeah.” Shaw didn't see how it was worth _that_ much smirking. There could have been any number of reasons she wanted to know that had nothing to do with things worth smirking about.

“Would it help if I said nothing in either the Void or your world was actually real?”

“No. No it would not.”

Root's black eyes danced with mischief. “Well, in that case, Shaw, you could say that my body there is every bit as real as your body here.”

“Can you get hurt there then?”

“Are you planning on...hurting me, sweetie?” Root asked, her smile hungry.

“Only if you ask nicely.”

She regretted saying it almost immediately because Root's grin widened. She needed to stop encouraging her. Probably.

“I can get hurt in the Void if the Void chooses to allow it.”

“Why would it ever do that?”

“Well, for example--” Root brushed her hair back over one shoulder and pulled down the collar of her jacket with a finger to show off a purplish bruise on the side of her neck. “--if I choose to be hurt of my own will.” She let her collar go. “Now you can stop trying to sneak looks at my neck every five seconds.”

Shaw was suddenly intensely focused on staring at the side of the dumpster. She cleared her throat. “So you could die if the Void allowed it?”

Root was quiet for long enough that Shaw looked up to make sure she hadn't vanished, but she was still sitting there, face blank of any recognizable expression and black eyes burning holes into Shaw. With all the teasing and flirting it was easy to forget what Root was, but right now she definitely didn't seem like anything from this world.

“Yes,” she said finally. “I could. Are you planning to kill me, Shaw?”

“What? No. I was wondering if whatever made that tear we saw in the archives could hurt you.”

“Oh.” Root's face softened a little. “I'm not sure, but I'd rather not find out.” She jumped down off the edge into the dumpster (and though it looked like there was weight to her, nothing stirred under her feet as she landed and no sound came from her feet hitting the metal) and sat down next to Shaw, only a breath of space between them. “Do you miss Pandyssia?”

“Are you nuts?” She'd dreamed about that place again last night, about the huge, grey panther, its elongated white canines visible even with its mouth shut, that had stared at her with enormous yellow eyes in the night. She'd been acutely aware of her pulse racing, her breath frozen in her lungs, the individual drops of sweat rolling down her back. It had been the most terrifying moment in her life and simultaneously the most alive she'd ever felt.

Maybe she did miss it a little.

“I could take you back there, you know, after you finish with all this. If you wanted.”

“Think I'll pass.”

Root reached out with a single finger as if to bop Shaw on the nose and Shaw grabbed her wrist without thinking. She heard Root's startled inhale of breath and turned to see a pleased smile on her face.

“What?” Shaw asked. Maybe Root was just into getting grabbed like that, but Shaw still felt like she was missing something here.

“Where are we, Shaw?”

Realization hit Shaw and she turned back to look at where her fingers wrapped around Root's wrist. Root's wrist which her hand should have passed through like smoke. She released it and looked around wildly. There were silver-grey flickers here and there, in the corner of her eye, but that was the only sign she saw that anything had changed.

“You pull me into the Void again?” she asked. “I'm kind of waiting for someone here, you know.”

“I didn't do anything, Shaw.”

“Then how the hell--”

“You've got company, sweetie.” And Root vanished again.

“I heard you ran off to Pandyssia,” a voice from above Shaw said, “so maybe I shouldn't be surprised you're talking to yourself like a crazy person now.”

Shaw sighed and pulled herself to her feet to face the new arrival, stretching life back into her limbs. The faint flickers of the Void were gone now. “Figured you'd have survived all the upheaval, Harper.”

Harper stepped back to let Shaw jump out of the dumpster, but she made no move to help her. Shaw spotted all three of the armed women who were doing a decent-but-not-quite-good-enough job of hiding nearby, all of whom no doubt had various projectile weapons aimed right at her.

“Survived it?” Harper said, scornfully. “I saw it coming for months and got myself the hell out of town. I have no interest in being caught in the crossfire of a bunch of warring nobility. They're all way too wrapped up in whose ass is on the throne to notice all the people getting squished under their fancy boots.”

“Sounds about right. Maybe I should be glad I was out of town.”

“You definitely should be.” Harper looked her up and down. “Now how about you tell me what was so important you left marks all over town for me?”

Shaw had hoped to move the conversation somewhere more private, but Harper showed no interest in leaving. Oh well. “Needed some impossible to come by information and I knew you were the only one with a chance in hell of having it.”

“Flattery will get you places, but it won't get you a discount. What sort of information?”

“Blueprints or security system information on the new vault under Dunwall tower that the Empress had built. Anything you can get on what's inside it.”

Harper's eyebrows shot up. “Why not ask for an invitation to a private brunch with the Empress while you're at it?”

“Because that sounds lame. I take it this means you can't help me?”

“Didn't say that. I might be able to get something along the lines of what you're looking for, but it's going to cost you.”

Shaw had been prepared for that and also aware that Harper likely was going to ask more coin than even Shaw could steal in less than a day, and with Elias already getting first dibs on anything they stole, she'd needed to come up with something priceless quickly. She pulled a small waterproof leather tube from inside her coat and held it up.

“I've got something here that might interest you, but first I want to know what sort of information I'm trading for.”

Harper eyed the tube thoughtfully. “There's a code needed to open the outer door of the vault, two codes actually, and they change every few days. I can get you the current ones if the price is right. Maybe even some information on any security devices they might have.”

“By tonight?”

Harper laughed. “That tube better be full of gold, Shaw. Yeah, by tonight. Now show me what you're offering.”

Shaw uncapped the tube and pulled a stack of rolled up papers from it. She carefully unfurled them and held them up so Harper could see the top one.

“Is that…?”

Shaw shuffled through a few more of the papers, letting Harper get a good look at the immaculately drawn and detailed sketches. More than half the creatures and plants depicted on them had never been seen before in the Isles and the rest there were no good records of. Many people had gone to Pandyssia over the years, but they'd only scratched the surface of what it had to offer.

“There's a lot of collectors and natural philosopher types out there who would just love to get their hands on these,” Shaw said, rolling them back up and carefully returning them to the tube. “Only copies available in the world.”

“And how did you get them?”

“I was in Pandyssia for months. I saw a lot of shit.” She'd done most of the sketching on the boat on the way back, and gotten some chalk and inks to finish the coloring early this morning.

“You drew those?” Harper whistled in appreciation. “Damn, didn't know you could draw like that. You're wasted on a life of crime.”

“I like crime, thanks. Now do we have a deal?”

Harper's eyes were locked to the tube, no doubt already calculating how to get the most out of it. “Meet me back here in two hours and I'll have your codes.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> next chapter will obviously be the vault heist


	6. The Vault

The smell of the sewers was a relief after Slaughterhouse Row which was saying a lot. Down here following Elias and a few of his Rat Catchers Shaw felt back in her element. This whole day had been a return to normal for her, and while there was the nagging sensation that this normal wasn't _her_ normal anymore, it was still nice to sink into it for now.

The fact she was armed to the teeth didn't hurt either. The long, straight knife she'd gotten on the pirate ship was still at her waist, but she'd supplemented it with a pistol, a couple of the stun mines that were so popular with the city guards, and a spring razor trap that she hoped not to have to use. Damn things left way too much of a mess.

“You don't have to come along if you don't want to,” Shaw said quietly to Reese for the third time. The security that Harper had described in the vault had sounded less extreme than Shaw had been worried about, but still heavy. She didn't want Reese ending up dead or in jail because of some fool's errand he didn't have a real stake in.

“I know,” Reese replied the same way he had the last two times. “You're not getting rid of me, Shaw.”

She was both grateful for the support and a bit annoyed by it--it'd be hard to use her powers with Reese tagging along. Sooner or later he was probably going to find out about them, but she'd rather put later off for as long as possible. Though of course there was the pesky fact that she needed a second person to get through the security locks in the vault.

“Through there.” Elias pointed at a half-collapsed tunnel off the main sewer branch. “There's an access door on the other side that opens into the whale oil supply room across from the vault entrance.”

“There usually guards in there?” Shaw asked.

“We don't go near there if we can help it,” Elias said. “And this is where we leave you. I consider my debt to you repaid now, John.”

Reese nodded. “We'll see you if we make it out.”

“Good luck.”

They waited until Elias and the others were out of sight before venturing into the new tunnel. The rocks piled high shifted underfoot, but there was enough room at the top to squeeze through (though it was much easier for Shaw than Reese), and the promised door was just around the next corner.

Reese pulled out a set of lockpicks that were much nicer than the ones he'd had before Shaw had left and made short work of the lock.

“Wait a second,” Shaw said before he could open the door. She walked over to it and placed her hand against the wood. If she'd really been able to see partly into the Void earlier without Root's help then theoretically she should be able to do it again. She wasn't sure exactly how to go about it since it had happened without her realizing it earlier, but maybe she could recreate it.

She remembered Root's hand reaching for her and her irritation and the way some part of her had been so sure she could grab Root's wrist. Had she shifted reality somehow? She tried to focus, to reach out to the Void, but nothing happened. She stepped back, momentarily defeated.

“Never mind, let's go.”

Reese looked at her a little curiously but didn't comment.

The room on the other side of the door was empty of any guards or security systems. There was a whale oil tank dispenser, a filling pump for oil, and a couple empty tranks strewn about the area. Shaw went to the door on the other side and ducked down to see if she could get a look through the keyhole.

“Too dark to see much,” she said quietly to Reese when she straightened back up. She didn't want to go in blind, but sometimes there was no helping it.

Fortunately the dark passage beyond was deserted, but she could hear voices from down the hall. Shaw went first, confident in her ability to be sneakier than Reese (especially after Pandyssia), and peered around the corner into a much larger room. The vault was an entire underground set of chambers locked off from the world by a heavy security door which required two codes to be entered on two separate dials simultaneously, presumably to make it harder to rob. There were also various security points in the rooms inside, all of which also required two unique codes. Two guards were talking in front of the outer door, almost too soft for Shaw to hear, but she caught one of them saying something about Fugue Feast.

She almost wished she'd told Reese about her powers before they came here so she could have given them the upper hand, but in the middle of a robbery wasn't the correct place for that discussion.

“I've got the one on the left,” she whispered to Reese. He gave a brief nod and they both vanished into the shadows of the large room going around in opposite directions. The guard on the right had only a split second to look startled by her appearing out of nowhere and wrapping her arm around the other guard's throat before Reese came out of the darkness behind him and smacked him over the head.

“Way to give the guy a concussion,” she said in a quiet hiss. She let her now-unconscious guard fall to the ground and watched as his head bounced off the ground. Reese raised an eyebrow at her.

“Shut up,” she grumbled and gave him the slip of paper with the first lock code.

There was a lock combination panel on either side of the main door and they each stepped up to one and spun the dials to the correct numbers at the same time. There was a click from deep within the wall and the massive metal door swung open slowly.

Shaw was the first one in again, her eyes sweeping the area for traps. There was an arc pylon sitting in the hallway that led further into the vault, its metal coils crackling with electricity. Every guard on duty would have been attuned to the device when their shift started so it wouldn't fire at them, but Shaw and Reese wouldn't be recognized and the damn thing would either stun or disintegrate them depending on how serious the Empress was about securing the vault.

There were other ways to get around the things, but most required far more room than they had to maneuver.

“Door over there,” Reese said with a chin jerk towards the corner. “Bet the tank powering it is in there. You have the codes for the security rooms too by any chance?”

“Somewhere on here.” She unrolled the code parchment Harper had given her. Harper had really delivered on her part of the bargain. The door to the security closet was just out of range of the crackling pylon which Shaw assumed was so guards could safely turn it off in an emergency. It made sense, but it still felt felt a security flaw. She spun in the code (only one was needed for this door) and took the tank of whale oil out of the power housing. The pylon hissed as it lost power and settled into silence.

“So far, so good,” Reese whispered when he rejoined her.

Harper hadn't been able to tell Shaw too much about the layout inside the vault, but she had mentioned there was a high security room that housed the most dangerous or unknown artifacts that had been seized by the Overseers and Shaw had a feeling that this knife qualified as dangerous.

The hallway had a couple rooms off it that they mostly ignored and a guard post near the end that seemed abandoned.

“It's like they want this place to get robbed,” Reese murmured.

Shaw shuffled through the papers on the desk and found one that looked like a rough map of the vault, perhaps scrawled by some guard who got lost easily. Shaw motioned Reese over and they examined it together.

“Think the vault must be the bit labelled ‘Dangerous and Creepy Shit’,” she said finally. The markers on the maps seemed to be more commentary than room names. She wondered what the ‘Fancy Room’ was supposed to be.

“Let's go then,” Reese said.

Shaw stopped to look in one of the rooms they passed when a flash of a familiar color caught her eye. There were boxes upon boxes of Oveerseer masks crammed into the room, their empty eyes staring up at the ceiling.

“I think everything down here might qualify as creepy shit,” Reese whispered.

Shaw was inclined to agree. The uneasy feelings people had for the Overseers’ order had been most of the reason for the decline in volunteers.

They ducked further into the room at the sound of footsteps approaching, and held their breaths as the patrol drew closer. They'd hidden the unconscious guards, but there was no way to hide that they'd turned off the pylon so their best hope was that the guards’ patrol wouldn't go past them. Or….

Shaw had hoped not to have to use the stun mine she'd brought along--they were a bit too flashy and definitely too expensive to be used freely. Still, she didn't see a good alternative. She clicked the little round mine the size of her palm into the armed state and carefully placed it just outside the doorway. She'd attuned the thing to both of them earlier, but they still backed up into the room more just to be safe.

The mine went off with a hiss and pop and Shaw heard two bodies hit the ground.

“How long do we have until this shift is over?” Reese asked Shaw as they dragged the unconscious guards into the room full of masks.

“Harper said each shift lasts four hours, and they were already an hour in. So maybe two and a half?” It didn't sound like nearly enough time, but it'd have to do.

There was one final obstacle between them and the high security room--a wall of light. The metal gate buzzing with deadly electricity stretched across the hallway with no alternative routes or ways around it. The whale oil tank for it was almost definitely around the corner on the far side based on the cord. Shaw sighed. There was only one way they were getting through that.

“Okay, listen, I'm going to go switch it off and we can talk about this later,” she whispered to Reese.

“Talk about what?”

Shaw took a step forwards and twisted her hand so the world spun away for a split second and then she stood on the far side of the gate, just out of range. She didn't bother to look back at Reese before she went and pulled the tank and the gate fell silent.

“This looks like it,” Reese said when he joined her. He pointed at the metal door at the end of the hall. He must have taken her seriously when she'd said they'd discuss it later because he didn't even glance at her hands to look for a mark though he must have known exactly what her teleportation had been.

“Last set of combinations.” Shaw opened the paper again and gave it to Reese. She had her code memorized. The lock clicked open and they entered what looked like the inside of an enormous safe.

“Well, this place is a mess,” Reese said looking around at the precariously stacked boxes filling the room. “Don't suppose there's any type of listing of all the stuff in here?”

“Somewhere there is, but my source had no way of getting their hands on it.” Shaw suspected the Empress was the only one with a copy--or possibly the royal protector as well. “Also mind the door. It's on a timer. In twenty minutes it'll shut automatically and we'll get locked in.”

“What happens then?”

“If we're outside we have to enter the next set of codes.” They had two sets of codes and then after that the door stayed locked unless they could find another one. “If we're inside I guess we either get arrested or die of dehydration if no one finds us.”

“Okay, then we'd better get started.”

Shaw wasn't surprised to find tons of those music boxes the Overseers used to ‘disrupt Void witchcraft’ as they put it. She'd only seen one out in the world once before and never heard one used, and she had to admit she was curious, but now wasn't the time. (She was also unsure how that music would affect her now with her link to the Void, so maybe it was just as well). The boxes of random gadgets and documents crammed into the room seemed endless.

Nineteen minutes later they both went into the hall and waited for the door to swing shut so they could enter the new codes.

“Last chance,” Shaw said as they resumed their search.

She was halfway through a box of strange items carved out of whale bone when she heard voices in the hall. Reese was by the door, going through a box of rusty weapons and he looked up to meet her eyes. Any second now the guards were going to see the open door and could potentially lock both of them inside.

“Go,” she whispered urgently. If they both got stuck in here it was the end of the road for them, and if they didn't find the knife now then they'd never get another chance. Reese looked like he might argue but then he nodded and slipped out the door, shutting it behind him and locking her in. It made sense--outside he had a chance at getting another set of codes off a guard and forcing someone to open the door with him and inside she had time to look through the rest of the boxes. It still sucked though.

“Well, isn't this cozy.” Root picked her way around the room, peering into boxes.

“Figured you might show up now.”

Root looked over her shoulder into the box of whale bones. “I can't say I'm a fan of this place, but at least it doesn't lack for interesting items. Some of which I could do without.”

“Any guesses where this knife might be?”

Root tsked at her. “You should be able to see it on your own, Shaw.”

“Should be? You mean one of these powers I have would let me spot it? Why the hell didn't you tell me this earlier?”

“Technically you already knew.”

Root was just out of reach to be throttled unless Shaw got up from the box she was sitting next to, and of course there was the whole intangible problem. Although earlier….

“Earlier today, in the dumpster, you said you weren't responsible for pulling me into the Void or letting me see it or however that worked. Did I do that?”

“You weren't in the Void, it was more like you opened your eyes differently and could see further. You could see both your world and the Void at once so you could interact with both at once. It's never really about movement, Shaw, it's about seeing all the layers.”

That was about as useful as Shaw had expected, but maybe she could at least work with it. She stood up and walked across the floor to stand in front of Root. Root's eyes widened and a smirk crept onto her lips.

“Are you thinking about touching me, sweetie?”

“No. Well, yes, but not like _that_. Now shut up and let me concentrate.”

Root didn't stop smirking, but she did shut up.

Shaw had come up the conclusion that her powers had a lot to do with intent--when she traversed it was about her intention to appear somewhere else and when she'd swapped the guard and the shutter the day before that had been about intending them to both be elsewhere--but intent didn't seem to be helping her much in this case as her fingers went through Root's arm for the third time. She knew she was trying too hard, but she didn't know how else to attempt this and she really needed to find that knife.

“Let's try something else,” Root said after Shaw's fingers passed through her again. “Sit.”

Shaw looked at her doubtfully, but sat. It wasn't like she had a better idea. Root sat down across from her.

“Good, now shut your eyes.”

“Not happening.”

Root pursed her lips. “You're going to have to trust me if you want this to work, Shaw.”

Shaw glared at her, but, lacking a better option, she slowly shut her eyes.

“Okay, so what now?” she asked after a few seconds of silence ticked by. She wondered what Reese was up to. Had he taken out the guards or snuck around them? Had anyone spotted the ones they'd incapacitated earlier?

“Whatever you want now.” Root's voice breathed almost in her ear.

Shaw's hand shot out to intercept the intruder in her space and her fingers closed around warm skin. She opened her eyes to see Root's face inches from her own looking not at all put out by Shaw's hand around her throat.

“Interesting,” Shaw said as she removed her hand (did Root look disappointed?), “but I still have no clue how I did that.”

“Guess we'll have to practice somehow,” Root said far too innocently.

Shaw rolled her eyes and stood up to look around the vault again. Nothing looked different at first, but then she started spotting little things that were off. That box over there kept flickering out of existence, and there was an odd glow around another box that was full of whale bone charms when she checked it. And then there was the hole.

She didn't know how else to describe it. Every time she looked in the direction of the far corner of the vault it was like a black hole was burning there and leaving spots in her vision. That had to be it.

She did her best not to look directly at the spot as she dug through the box it was in. She came up with a long wooden case that was fastened with a little gold latch. She flipped it open and threw up her hand to shield her eyes from the piercing dark light that emanated from within it. There was a long bone knife in the red velvet of the case, almost shaped like a medical instrument of some sort, and the black fire rolled off it in waves. Shaw backed up, feeling slightly nauseated by whatever the knife was giving off.

“How do I switch this...vision back off?” she asked.

When Root didn't answer she turned to find her watching the glowing knife with something like fear in her eyes.

“You know what that thing is, Root?”

“I'm not sure, but I think it's what left those tears in the archives.”

Shaw tried to look back at the knife and grimaced. “That's a good thing though, right? We just destroy it and we're good?”

“The person who made it is still out there. What's to stop them from making more?”

It was a good point. “You telling me I have to turn whatever the hell that thing is over to the Overseers to find this person?” It had sounded like a bad idea before she'd found the knife and now it sounded crazy.

“I'm not telling you anything, Shaw.” Root had backed as far away from the knife as the room allowed.

“Could you not see it before?” Shaw asked curiously. Root had been all over the room earlier.

“It was...hiding from me, I think. When you opened the box though.…”

Shaw shut the box, which helped a little. “Well, I've got the knife, now I just need a way out.” There were no windows anywhere so she couldn't traverse out, and there wasn't even a handle on the inside of the door. “Don't suppose you could arrange a shortcut through the Void for me?”

“You're not bringing that knife through the Void.” There was no room for debate in Root's voice.

“Then I'm stuck.” Until Reese found a way to get her out anyway. She walked over to the far wall of the vault and sat down with her back up against some boxes. “Unless I have some other power you haven't told me about yet.”

“You do, but none that would be useful here.”

Shaw sighed in exasperation. “If I'm going to die here can you at least tell me what other powers I have?”

“No, I don't think I'll be sticking around right now.” Root's eyes were still locked on the closed case on the other side of the room.

The only thing worse than being stuck in a locked vault under Dunwall tower for some unspecified amount of time would be being bored while doing so. Shaw assessed her options.

“How about that practice you mentioned?” She let her inflection carry just the tiniest hint of suggestion and Root turned to look at her. A smile curled the edges of her lips as she stalked over towards Shaw, knife apparently temporarily forgotten.

“Why, Sameen, whatever are you suggesting?”

Shaw reached out to tug at Root's pants legs until Root took the hint and sank down so she was straddling Shaw's lap.

“Be a shame if we both missed out on some fun because I still couldn't look into the Void at will,” Shaw reasoned as she let her fingers creep above Root's waist and up under her jacket and shirt. She always expected Root to feel cold like the Void, but Root's skin was almost fever hot under her fingers. Much hotter than usual. Shaw looked up at Root with the start of a frown on her face. She definitely looked a little more flushed than even the current circumstances called for. “Are you sick?”

Root shook her head as she slipped her fingers into Shaw's hair. “You're ruining the moment, sweetie,” she murmured before leaning in to kiss Shaw.

Shaw dug her fingers into Root's sides and pulled Root more firmly up against her. Root's stomach was soft under her fingers and, when Shaw scratched at it lightly with her nails, Root made a small pleased noise into their kiss that went through Shaw like a bolt of electricity. She abandoned Root's stomach in favor of slipping her hands down to grab Root's ass and pull her even tighter up against her. She broke away from Root's mouth to drop down to investigate her neck, pleased by how Root automatically tilted her head to give Shaw access. The mark Shaw had left there yesterday was a nice bruised reddish-purple, and she paused to appreciate it up close. She wanted to leave another one next to it. Or maybe she wanted Root to leave one on her. Or both.

“Shaw.”

Shaw looked back up at Root's voice and then flinched when Root jammed her finger right into her eye.

Or...almost did? Because suddenly the weight on top of her was gone and her eye was fine and Root was sitting next to her legs rather than on them and the flickers of the Void had vanished.

“Did you catch how you did it that time?” Root asked with a mischievous grin. She stood back up and dusted herself off.

Shaw waited until her breathing evened out before she attempted to answer. “You have the worst goddamn timing ever, don't you?”

“So I've heard.” She offered Shaw a hand up which Shaw tried to take without thinking about it but her hand passed through Root's.

“Goddammit.” She slumped back against the boxes. Why was this so hard?

“The good news is that your friend Reese is on his way back here.”

“About damn time.” She got to her feet, smoothing out her coat and adjusting her belt so her pistol wasn't digging into her side. Maybe it was a good thing they'd stopped--having that spring razor trap she'd forgotten about go off in her pocket would have been a bad way to go. “Does he have a second person with him to deal with the lock?”

“He's dragging one of the guards along and trying to act menacing.”

That sounded promising. She went over to get the knife box and tucked it under her arm. She might not have been affected by it anymore now that she couldn't see into the Void, but Root must still have been because she moved further away from Shaw.

“You so much as twitch in an unfriendly way and this goes through your eye,” came Reese's muffled voice from the other side of the door. Shaw allowed herself a small smile as she backed up. When the door swung open it was to the sight of the guard Reese had kidnapped falling to the floor in blissful unconsciousness as Reese released him from a choke hold. There was a small pile of incapacitated guards in one corner nearby. Reese had been busy.

“You got the knife?” he asked.

She held up the box a she walked past him. “Whatever the fuck this is may be too dangerous to hand over.”

Reese hurried to keep up with her as she sped down the hall towards the exit. “You giving up on finding this guy then?”

“No, just think we need to find another way.” She used a lever to open the main vault door and noted that there were a lot more guards down out here. Reese had been _really_ busy. She felt a little better once they were back in the whale oil filling room they'd started from and headed back into the sewers.

“Don't suppose your mysterious source might know about this guy as well?” Reese asked as they crawled back through the collapsed tunnel.

“They don't.” She'd asked. Whoever this guy who'd made the knife was, the Abbey had made sure whispers of what he was up to had stayed within the Abbey. “We may have to find another Overseer.”

“That won't be necessary.”

Shaw turned to find they had a welcoming party. All three of the newcomers wore the bronze masks of the Overseers and two of them were pointing pistols at her and Reese. The third, shorter than the others, only had a light crossbow and had his free hand stretched out to them. “I'll take that box, Sameen Shaw.”

“How the hell did you get out of Coldridge, Brother Jacob?” she asked, because even if his face was hidden, she recognized that voice.

“None of your concern.” He waved his hand impatiently. “The box? I don't wish to kill you, but I will if you leave me no alternative.”

Shaw thought she could probably take down one of the Overseers before they could fire, but not all three. And even if her and Reese each took one down, that left the last one to shoot at them.

“You still going to give us that name?” she asked as she stepped forwards carefully.

“Of course, the man who made that knife is a danger to our order. Why do you think I don't want to kill you? Now hurry up.”

Shaw placed the box in his hand with a sinking feeling that this was the worst possible thing she could have done with that knife. “The information?” she asked as she let go.

Brother Jacob fumbled at the box, trying to open it with one hand. “Yes, yes, Brother Alexi, give her the information.”

One of the Overseers tossed something at Shaw--a little metal tube of the kind that was used to transport messages. She opened it and pulled the paper inside out just enough to see it was covered with writing.

“It looks like such a small thing, doesn't it?”

Shaw looked up to see Brother Jacob holding the knife up in front of himself.

“It's truly a marvel that he created even if he used it for such evil ends.”

“A marvel? That thing tears holes in the Void. Thought you lot were against that sort of thing.” Shaw watched the other two Overseers carefully. With Brother Jacob distracted by the knife there might be a chance here.

“It's all a matter of what you use it for,” Brother Jacob said and then his head jerked up as the sound of a shot fired off down the tunnel.

Shaw hit the ground as pistols went off everywhere. She could see people dodging in and out of cover further down the tunnel.

“It's Elias,” Reese called from where he'd ducked behind a wall. “He really hates the Overseers.”

Shaw returned her attention to the fight to find only two Overseers now and then quickly looked around until she spotted Brother Jacob running down a side tunnel.

“No fucking way.” She got up as high as she dared and took off down the hall after him. Brother Jacob was rather spry for an old coot, but Shaw could have outrun him in her sleep. She grabbed his arm and spun him around. The knife sliced across the inside of her right arm and she grunted in pain and staggered back. It _burned_. It hurt so much her eyes watered and her vision blurred.

“What in the Void…? What manner of witchcraft is this?” Brother Jacob sounded terrified.

Shaw looked up through her darkening vision to see someone was standing in front of her, their back to her. She could see long brown hair and a black jacket. Root. Fingers wrapped around Shaw's arm, the left one, and pulled it up so her palm pointed forwards and she could see the brand on the back of her hand glowing bright blue.

“I'm going to need you to trust me for a second, Sameen.”

“Fine, whatever.” The entire world was foggy and spinning and then there was a pull from deep inside of her and she saw a large dark shape appear on the ground in front of her and leap across the floor towards Brother Jacob, and then the darkness at the edges of her vision took over and she collapsed to the floor.


	7. The Dreamless Void

Shaw woke up in a real bed for the first time in over a year. The room she was in was small and nondescript and she could hear music in the near distance and the sounds of muffled voices. Most likely an inn then.

She struggled to sit up in bed and sucked in a deep breath at the twinge from her arm when she put weight on it. Right. Her arm. The tunnel. Brother Jacob. Where was Reese? Had he gotten the knife back? What had happened to the Overseers?

Someone had done a barely adequate job of tending to her injury and she unwound the bandage impatiently. The cut stretched half the length of her forearm, and was pitch black rather than red, like it was sucking in all the light around it. Her arm felt weird, heavy, and slightly numb.

“What the fuck is that knife?” she asked quietly.

“Something very, very dangerous.” Root sat cross-legged on the end of the bed watching her with an odd expression. “It can sever the connection between something in your world and the Void.”

“My arm was connected to the Void? That your doing?”

“Everything is connected to the Void, Shaw, to a small degree at least. That's the natural order of things. To be cut off from the Void is to be cut off from dreams, from possibilities, from anything that isn't solid and weighted. It'd drive any living thing mad.”

“Am I cut off from the Void now?” She looked at the back of her left hand to find the mark still intact.

“No, it would take a lot more than that to cut a human off completely.”

Shaw remembered Root standing in front of her in the tunnel. “What would have happen if you'd gotten stabbed with it?”

Root's face went carefully blank. “Let's hope we don't find out.”

“What did you do to Brother Jacob? He dead?”

“No such luck, he seems to have gotten away. I can't do anything to him directly. I just let him see the evil he expected to see in a creature of the Void. His mind did most of the work for me. I'm afraid he might think you're some acolyte of the Outsider now, though I guess he'd only be partly wrong about that.”

“You did something else though, with my hand.” She couldn't remember exactly what it had felt like but she remembered there’ d been some dark shape rising up from the floor. It’d looked almost like an animal.

“Just woke up one of your latent powers. Maybe it'll be easier for you to activate it on your own now.”

“And Reese?”

“The big lug carried you out of the sewers and brought you back here. I suppose he's handy to have around after all.” Root's fingers were picking at the blankets even though she couldn't touch them properly. “How does your arm feel?”

“Odd. Heavy. Is it going to get worse?”

Root shook her head. “I'm not sure. There's a chance the damage heals on its own since it was only a tiny scratch and the rest of you is still connected to the Void. I suppose there's also a chance it spreads. I don't know much about it.”

“But the guy Brother Jacob sent us after will.” She studied the room a little more closely, looking for her stuff. Her long coat was hung over a chair near the window and she saw her knife and pistol on the little table nearby. Hopefully the information Brother Jacob had gotten her was still safely tucked away in her coat pocket.

She slipped out from under the covers (Reese, ever the gentleman, had removed only her shoes and coat) and went to go check.

“We're going to have to deal with both of them now,” Shaw said as she fished around in her coat pockets. “Brother Jacob and this other guy. That knife is too dangerous to leave in the possession of lunatics.” Her fingers closed around the little metal tube and she breathed a sigh of relief.

“What would you do if I asked you to drop this?” Root's quiet question made Shaw straighten back up. Root was watching her with the same odd expression she'd had since Shaw had woken up.

“Drop it? Why would I drop it? You told me yourself how dangerous this knife is.”

Root visibly hesitated before speaking. “Of course. It was...never mind. What does the message say?”

Shaw thought about trying to pry out whatever it was that Root was so off-balance about (was she scared of the knife? why had she gotten in front of Shaw if she was that scared?) but her curiosity over their hard-earned reward took precedence and she pulled the message out and tried to flatten the paper enough to read it.

“It's a letter,” she said as she skimmed through it. “From former High Overseer Khulan to Brother Jacob. He asked Brother Jacob to take a younger Overseer, Thomas, under his watch. Brother Thomas showed great promise but ‘is prone to look beyond the boundaries set forth by the strictures for answers rather than adhering to our ways’. Khulan thought that Jacob might help guide him and keep an eye on his ‘tinkering’.” Shaw looked up. “I'm guessing this Brother Thomas is the man we're after.”

“Does it say anything else?”

“Uh, ‘Brother Thomas has caused some unrest within the Abbey and we think it would be best if he spent some time elsewhere, perhaps in that new lab you built? If he continues to cause issues then we will coordinate with you on further steps to be carried out.’ Guess that means they were going to kill him if he didn’t shape up.”

“The coup probably interrupted that whole plan,” Root said. “So many of the Overseers died during that time and then when the Empress retook the throne she dissolved the Abbey. Brother Thomas must have fallen between the cracks.”

“Shouldn't you know all about him?”

Root looked away from her, out the window. “I can't see Brother Thomas at all.”

“How can he manage that? I would have thought it was impossible to hide from you.” Realization hit her as the words left her mouth and she looked down at her heavy right arm. “He cut himself away from the Void? Wouldn't that have driven him mad?”

“If he wasn't already, yes.”

“Just great.” Shaw sat down on the edge of the bed. “Brother Jacob must think Thomas is still in this lab of his. Shouldn't be too hard to find if we can get our hands on a record of the property Brother Jacob owned.”

“I know where the lab is.” Root was still looking out the window with her back to Shaw.

“Wouldn't that be cheating?”

“Do you want it or not?” Root sounded almost angry and Shaw thought back over their conversation but there was nothing she could remember that should have bothered Root.

“Yeah, I want it, I just thought….” She wasn't sure what she'd thought, only that this quiet and intense version of Root was unsettling and she didn't like seeing her like this. She reached out with one hand to try and touch Root's shoulder, but her fingers went right through her. She sighed. “Where's the lab?”

* * *

 

The Mutcherhaven District was north of the city walls and mostly known for being the location of the infamous Brigmore Manor, an old estate that had housed all sorts of criminals over the years. Brother Jacob's lab was in a large stone house high above the manor on the cliffs overlooking the Wrenhaven river and had been left empty since his imprisonment. While the Empress had seized all of the Abbey's properties, she hadn't touched the privately owned property belonging to its members and as far as anyone knew, the house should be deserted.

“Someone's living there,” Reese said as they walked by the house for the third time. There were few enough people wandering around here that trying to remain inconspicuous was proving a challenge. “Footprints on the side steps.” The steps were partly shielded from the rain so the wet prints stood out. Finally the light rain had proven useful rather than annoying.

Shaw strained to see into the Void again like she had back in the vault, but it was like trying to catch smoke with her fingers.

“Suppose we should wait until after dark to do this?” she asked. “Too exposed out here in the light.”

“Yeah, might as well go get an early dinner and come back later.”

It was a long walk back to the the inn she was staying at. (Reese had an apartment of his own, but he'd gotten her a room at the inn for a week while she'd been unconscious. She’d tried to argue about the cost with him until he'd shown her how much coin they'd gotten from some of the items Reese had pocketed in the vault. Apparently the Fancy Room had been _very_ fancy). The topic she'd been expecting to be raised wasn't broached until they were nearly halfway back.

“So, the Outsider,” Reese started cautiously.

Shaw glanced around them but there was no one within earshot. “What about him?”

“Not as retired as people think he is?” Reese tapped the back of his left hand and Shaw tightened her fingers to feel the leather drag across her mark.

“Oh, he's gone alright. There's...something new in the Void now.”

“Something new?”

“That's right.” She had no intention of explaining Root unless she had to.

“Okay, fine, but whatever it is over there gave you a mark right? You've got powers like the ones the Outsider used to give people? Like what Daud had.”

“I guess so, though everyone has different powers or something.”

“Anything else I need to know? Like maybe why that cut on your arm wasn't bleeding and looked off?”

“That knife made the tears in the archives. It can cut someone's connection to the Void completely.”

“So are you cut off now?”

“No, I think it'd take a lot more than one tiny cut. I don't like what Brother Jacob said about using that thing though. I don't trust him any more than the guy who made it. Possibly less.”

“We going after him when we finish with Thomas?”

“That's the plan.”

Root failed to make an appearance before the evening which Shaw put down to Reese's presence, or possibly to Root still being in a mood like she'd been earlier. Either way, she tried not to think about her too much and to focus on the upcoming plan.

As they headed back to the Mutcherhaven District that night, she felt the mark on the back of her hand tingle slightly like it often did when Root showed up but Shaw couldn't spot her anywhere.

“You good?” Reese asked when she looked over her shoulder for the third time.

“Yeah, just making sure no one's following us.”

The large two story house was dark and definitely appeared to be empty at a glance, but something told Shaw that there was someone in there. She popped the lock on the side door and they both crept into the quiet interior. The inside looked abandoned as well, with thick layers of dust on all the furniture, but there were footprints disturbing the dust on the floor which made an easy to follow trail to a set of stairs down. Brother Jacob's lab had been built in the extensive basement of the house according to the city records Reese had borrowed.

“Looks like Brother Thomas has been living down there,” Shaw whispered.

“Hiding from the guards probably.”

It took Shaw a few seconds to make sense of what greeted them at the bottom of the steps. There were rocks and piles of metal crates stacked everywhere turning the huge room into a maze of sorts with diverging pathways through the mess. Here and there were boxes and rocks of all sizes suspended by cables hanging from the rafters of the high ceiling. There was something eerily familiar about watching the rocks spin slowly in the air.

“The Void,” she said under her breath. Brother Thomas had tried to make the basement look like the Void. What the hell was going on here?

“I know you're there.” The voice echoed through the basement, bouncing off the makeshift walls. Shaw couldn't pinpoint where it had come from. “I had a dream you'd come, before I cut all the dreams away.”

“That's not creepy at all,” Shaw muttered. She looked over at Reese. “Watch the stairs in case he makes a run for it.” Reese looked like he was going to argue so she turned away before he could and started into the maze.

“It never made sense to me,” the voice that had to be Brother Thomas continued, “the Abbey acknowledges the Void and all the danger it possesses, and yet they do nothing about it other than forbid witchcraft and stand against the Outsider.”

Shaw turned left in the maze, trying to navigate towards what looked like an open space on the far side. She was too short to be able to see much over the walls here which kept her from traversing in any practical way.

“Of course they never really stood against the Outsider at all. They just burned supposed witches and smashed bone charms. They couldn't even fight, let alone win.”

Shaw had her knife and pistol out now and slowed her pace so she could walk as silently as possible. She wanted to take this guy down before he saw her if the opportunity presented itself.

“The Void is the real problem, you see, not the Outsider. Or maybe they're the same problem. It doesn't matter now. I know how to fix it, but he wouldn't let me. He wanted to use it, to harness that evil we were created to oppose. I couldn't let that happen.”

‘He’ must have been Brother Jacob and while Shaw wasn't sure what he might want to harness the power of the Void for, it probably wasn't for anything good.

“I could have saved us all,” Thomas continued from much closer now. “I was going to separate our worlds, set us free from the Void forever, but he took my knife and I had to start over again.”

So the tears at the archives had only been the beginning. Brother Thomas wanted to cut the entire world off from the Void, which sounded dangerous and likely impossible. Shaw wondered if Root was around listening to all this.

“It's the whales, you know. They exist in both spaces at once and tie us together. Their bones are so powerful because they can touch both sides. My knife, I made it from whalebone so it could cut between the two, but it was an almost impossible task and it's been hard to recreate.”

Shaw rounded the last corner and came out into the open space on the far end of the room. There was a long work bench along the wall covered with hundreds and hundreds of bones (whale bones, not human ones by her brief assessment). Brother Thomas was a thin man with bloodshot eyes and wild hair that looked like it hadn't been cut in months. He sat curled into a ball on the one chair in front of the bench, facing her, and holding a whalebone knife that was easily twice as large as the one they'd taken from the vault. He looked at her blankly when she approached.

“I can't see it anymore,” he said mournfully. “I cut it all away and now I can't dream and I can't sleep and everything is heavy and dark and cold.”

“Is that why you tried to recreate the Void here?” Shaw asked. She'd planned to kill him without a word, but that knife made her nervous. If she missed or he dodged then she could end up getting cut away from the Void for real.

“It's unbalanced,” Thomas explained. “Once everything is cut away it will all stabilize, but the pressure right now...the pressure….” He unfolded himself a little and sat forwards in his chair. “You work for it, even if you don't realize it yet. It wants you to kill me. I've scared it.”

“I don't think it works quite like that.” Root definitely wanted this guy gone, but did the Void? Could the Void actually want something on its own? “Tell you what, you give me that knife and I'll make sure Brother Jacob doesn't get a chance to misuse your first one.”

Thomas blinked and his eyes finally focused on her. “Brother Jacob has the knife?”

“Yeah, he cut my arm with it before he ran off. Feels all heavy and numb now.”

Thomas's eyes widened. “You feel it, too.”

“Can't say I'm crazy about it. Will it heal?”

Brother Thomas looked at her arm as if he could see through her coat sleeve. “It will stabilize.”

Not the most encouraging answer, but Shaw didn't think Thomas was going to elaborate.

“I think we both agree that Brother Jacob can't be trusted with your knife, right?” she asked. “Now I can get it back from him, but if you want my help you've got to give me that knife you have.”

For a second she thought Brother Thomas was going to agree, but then his eyes narrowed and he squinted at her suspiciously. “I can't help but wonder if you work for the Void. Willingly. You know so much and…. This could be a trick.”

“I don't work for anyone these days.”

“Show me the backs of your hands.”

The brand on the back of Shaw's left hand pulsed against the leather straps wrapped over it.

“My hands? Why?”

Brother Thomas stared at her, mouth slightly open like a confused child. Then his lips curled up into an ugly smile and he straightened up out of his chair.

“You are but another creature of the Void, sent here to stop me from freeing this world. I have nothing more to say to you.”

The split second it took her to adjust the aim on her pistol and pull the trigger was enough for Brother Thomas to move, faster than she'd thought was possible for someone who looked half-dead. The bullet hit the wall instead, sending fragments of brick flying. The problem with these damn pistols was how long it took between each shot, not even mentioning the slow process of reloading the thing. She shoved the pistol back in her belt and spun to meet Brother Thomas with her long knife out.

He came out of the shadows at her, the long bone knife slashing wildly in front of him and she had to jump back a step to avoid being hit by his wild flailing. She saw something in his other hand and only had a second to register what it was before a bright flash of white light burned into her vision and faded into darkness.

* * *

 

She wasn't supposed to interfere. That was one of the rules.

There hadn't been a list of rules presented to Root when she'd become part of the Void or anything silly like that--more like a shared understanding that she instantly inherited--and while she knew what she should and shouldn't be doing, the Void had never prevented her from going against its rules. Their rules. (There was no good way to describe the duality of her existence. She was the Void, or perhaps the Void was her, but she was also very much herself).

It had been an easy decision to give Sameen Shaw the mark ( _her_ mark)--Shaw was perfect to be a pivot point in the events of the Isles as long as she survived Pandyssia. It should have been that simple--give her the mark, give her a few cryptic instructions and a shove in the right direction, and then sit back and watch it all unfold--but she'd known almost right away that it was never going to be simple with Shaw.

Root should have been perfect for the role the Void needed her to fill--she had very little regard for human life and watching humanity's own horrible future unfold around it sounded like a good time to her--but somehow she hadn't been content to just watch things passively around Shaw. Maybe it was because of how long she'd spent trapped in darkness, or maybe it was because of the sheer tenacity Shaw exuded as she fought her way back to Dunwall, but Root hadn't been able to stop herself from the visits, and the hints, and then that kiss.

At first she'd thought the Void didn't know or was indulging her fascination (maybe the early years of all the denizens of the Void included an ill-advised affair), but when she'd stood in front of Shaw and seen Brother Jacob raise that...knife at her she'd realized that the Void's rules of neutrality applied to her as well. She could involve herself in this, but the Void wouldn't protect her from the consequences of her actions, no matter how much they were intertwined.

She had to see Brother Thomas through Shaw's eyes since she was blind to him after what he'd done to himself. She saw the second knife. She saw Shaw's bullet miss its mark. She saw Brother Thomas throw something on the floor that went off with a flash of bright light. And even though she couldn't see more, she'd known without a doubt what would come next and neither Shaw's death nor Shaw being permanently cut off from the Void was an outcome she was willing to risk.

There was an irony here that she'd become a being who was only supposed to watch from the shadows and, for the first time ever, she'd found something to care about.

She could enter the real world (as the humans called it) physically enough that even Brother Thomas could see her, it just put a strain on her, like she was tugging at the end of a rope that tied her back to the Void. She caught the first swing of Brother Thomas's knife with a dagger she'd plucked from thin air as she'd arrived. He fought erratically, desperately, like a rabid dog. It was impossible to predict his movements since he moved with no plan, making up for in aggression what he lacked in skill.

His knife met her dagger again and this time he twisted his blade so it scraped along the side of hers. She could feel it in her entire being--the knife that could cut through worlds. His knife slid past her dagger guard and for a second she thought she'd be stabbed in the gut, but Thomas's arm twisted at the last minute and his blade only scratched a burning line across her stomach.

She felt the sharp, cold shock of being ripped away, cut off, trapped. She reached for the Void but there was nothing there, nothing but her suddenly very physical body and no strength to hold it up. The entire world tilted sideways and she collapsed into darkness.

* * *

 

Shaw's first reaction when her vision cleared enough to see that Root had popped up in front of her had been annoyance (which was a fairly common feeling she got around Root). She didn't need Root to protect her like this _again._ Especially not when people were waving around those damn whalebone knives which most likely could actually hurt Root. Or worse.

Which was why her second reaction was to redouble her grip on her own knife and try to move around Root to get at Brother Thomas. She only made it one step before Root staggered back and then went limp and collapsed into a heap on the floor. Shaw almost moved to catch her, but she figured if Root was still alive she'd be better off with a few bruises than with whatever would happen if Brother Thomas kept attacking while Shaw's hands were full.

She swung her knife at him, fast, wide strikes that he had to move back to avoid. None came close to hitting him, but that hadn't been her objective either. They were clear of Root now which was all that Shaw could do for her now.

Brother Thomas was smiling gleefully, his eyes shining with fevered light. “I killed it! I killed a creature of the Void!”

“Better hope you didn't,” Shaw said quietly as she lined up another attack. She swung low, at his stomach, hoping to take him off guard. He scampered back to avoid it and then froze to look at something past her. She saw panic in his eyes and cursed as he turned heel and fled. She started to go after him and then paused as her eyes fixed on one of the larger rocks suspended from the ceiling. It was a little small, but….

The swap was effortless this time and the rock settled on the floor where Brother Thomas had been even as Brother Thomas appeared up near the ceiling and then plummeted to the floor with a satisfying _crack_.

Only then did Shaw spare a glance behind her to find that, as she'd suspected, Reese had joined her. Past him on the floor, Root lay unmoving.

“Help her!” she snapped at Reese and turned back to deal with Brother Thomas.

She could tell from the angle his arm lay at that it was broken badly. She thought his ankle and some ribs had gotten busted in the fall as well. He was still conscious, and, even though his teeth were gritted, he made no sound. The whalebone knife lay nearby on the floor, shattered to pieces.

It would have been easy to drag him out of here, shove an Overseer's mask on his face, and leave him for the guard to find. He could be the Empress's problem instead of hers.

She looked at the remains of the shattered knife, thought about how there was only one left now, about how only one person knew how to make them, about her arm which was still too heavy, about how Root had crumpled to the floor in front of her.

She made herself meet Brother Thomas's eyes as she placed the edge of her knife on his throat.

“I saw it again.”

“Saw what?” she asked, curious despite herself.

“The Void. It was only a single instant, but I saw it. I thought I never would again.”

She'd used her swap power on him and that worked by moving the two objects through the Void. It hadn't occurred to her in the moment and she was surprised it had worked at all.

“I felt it. It felt...it felt...like darkness. Like coldness and emptiness and hunger. They say the Void is neutral, unfeeling, but it is driven. Driven to consume the whole of reality.” Her stared at her intently. “They are evil, those creatures it sends to you from the darkness. Do not trust them.”

“I'll keep that in mind,” she said, and she drew the knife swiftly and cleanly across his throat.

Reese had taken his coat off and put it over Root when Shaw got back to them.

“She was shaking like she was freezing or something,” he said. “Had a slash on her stomach but it wasn't deep. She's out cold though.”

Shaw knelt next to Root and checked her pulse--much faster than she'd have expected. Her skin was burning under Shaw's fingers.

“She's got a fever, too, or...something.” She’d been fever hot before back in the vault when they’d found the first knife. Maybe this was some reaction to things that threatened the Void. Shaw gingerly pried open one of Root's eyes just enough to see it was still solid black. That, at least, was probably a good sign.

“Was she someone Brother Thomas had prisoner here or was she working with him? She’s dressed kind of strangely. Maybe she's an Overseer from one of the other Isles?”

It dawned on Shaw that Reese had no clue how Root had ended up here. It was probably about time for the full truth, but maybe not until they got out of here.

“She's...a friend.”

“You know her?”

“Yeah, and I'll explain it all later, but right now we need to get her somewhere safe and...” She could bandage Root's wound, and find something to treat the fever, but she didn't know what she could do if Root had been cut off from the Void. “...and see what we can do to fix this.”

“What about that thing?” Reese asked.

Shaw looked at the shattered knife again and sighed. “Guess we'd better bring that along as well.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is the only longer fic I've written completely from one pov with the very short passage in this chapter being the only exception.


	8. The Dreaming Void

It started pouring halfway through their dark walk back to Shaw's inn. Root was still wrapped in Reese's coat, but her hair was wet and cold against Shaw's neck. There wasn't anything to be done about that so Shaw just walked faster. Root felt different now from those times she'd touched her before. More solid. Had that knife cut her connection to the Void? Was she stuck here in the real world to live and die as a human now?

The common room of the inn was blessedly empty and no one stopped them on their way to her room. Root's clothes had mostly been protected from the rain by Reese's coat so Shaw only had to pull off her shoes and jacket before settling her in the bed.

“I've got some medical supplies over in my bag,” Shaw said as she rolled Root's shirt up to examine the cut on her stomach. It looked like the cut on her own arm in some ways, but even stranger, like her blood was mixed with something silver that flickered in and out of existence. Was the Void somehow part of Root’s physical form? Shaw cleaned the cut as best she could with the supplies Reese brought and held Root up enough that she could wind a bandage around her to hold a poultice in place. Root didn't stir once.

The fever was a little harder to deal with until Root woke up. Shaw had some herbs she could crush and mix with water to bring down her temperature, but Root would need to be awake to drink it and Shaw wasn't sure if anything would help if the fever wasn't from natural causes.

“Think that's all we can do for now,” she said, stepping back. “We'll have to wait for her to wake up.”

“Are you going to tell me who she is now?” Reese had sat down in the room’s only chair while she'd worked.

Right. That. Shaw sat on the edge of the bed and looked over Root while she gathered her thoughts. Asleep like this Root didn't look powerful or dangerous or mysterious or anything like that. No, there was something about Root lying there in her bed injured, face flushed with fever, and hair still wet from the rain that made Shaw want to go back and cut Brother Thomas's throat for a second time. She let the impulse fade away and turned back to Reese.

“You know how I said there was something new in the Void?”

Reese's eyes widened. “She's the new Outsider?”

“She's not the Outsider. She's…. Well, I guess she's similar, but she's been helping me.”

“Helping how?”

“Information, some hints on how to use my powers.” She tried very hard not to think about how Root had helped her with her powers in the vault. “And twice now she's tried to shield me from an attack.” She looked down at Root's flushed face surrounded by her dark, wet hair. “Idiot.”

“But how is she here?”

“Think that knife did something to her. Broke her connection to the Void maybe.”

“Is she human now then?”

Shaw remembered Root's solid black eyes and the silver in her blood. “No, I don't think so, but I do think she's stuck here right now, at least until she wakes up.” She looked back at Reese. “She might be out for a while if you wanted to go rest. Not much to do until she wakes up.” She wasn't going to go running off after Brother Jacob and leave Root here like this even if she'd had an idea of where he might be.

“You need someone to take a turn watching her?”

“Nah, I got it.” It was too weird having Reese able to see Root.

Reese stayed for a few more minutes and then finally left, still looking unconvinced. She sighed with relief once he was gone--now she was back down to one person to deal with. She changed into dry clothes and then settled into the chair and waited. Root still hadn't stirred when light started creeping in the window and Shaw dozed on and off, checking Root's pulse and temperature every hour or so.

Root didn't wake up until the late morning, right as Shaw pressed two fingers to her neck to check her pulse. She jerked suddenly and grabbed at Shaw's hand in alarm.

“Would you calm down?” Shaw grumbled, easily capturing both Root's wrists to fend her off. “I carried you back in the rain and this is the thanks I get?”

Root relaxed after a second, but there was still something close to terror on her face. “Where...this is your room at the inn, right?”

“Right.” Shaw wondered what it must be like to know everything one moment and then be lost the next. “Brother Thomas cut you with that knife of his and you collapsed.”

Root pushed the covers down far enough that she could see the bandages. “And you helped me.”

“Well, yeah. Figured I owed you one even if I didn't ask you to try and protect me like some idiot.” Root didn't say anything and Shaw tried to probe a little more. “I figured that knife must have messed with your connection to the Void somehow. Can you still, uh, feel it or however it works?”

Root fell back on the pillows. “Faintly. I'm still connected to it, but the connection was damaged somehow. I...don’t think it’s permanent. The Void is in every part of my being. I exist as...a fragment of it, I suppose.” Her fingers ran along the edge of the bandages. “I can still feel it, but it's faint, like an echo. I think...I think this will heal. There wasn't that much damage and Thomas's second knife was much weaker than his first one.” It sounded to Shaw like she was trying to convince herself more than anything else. “I think I'll be able to go back to the Void again, but...it may be a little while before I can figure that out. His knife drained me.”

Which meant Shaw was stuck with her full time until then. What the hell was she supposed to do with a displaced god?

“What happened to Brother Thomas and his knife?” Root asked. She sounded tired still.

“He's dead and his knife got smashed. Not sure what to do with the pieces, but I have them in a bag over there.”

“You killed him?”

“Yeah, wasn't that the plan?”

“It was, though I wasn't sure if…. You should find somewhere you can grind the knife fragments to powder. It's the surest way.” Root looked away from her, towards the wall.

Shaw felt like she was supposed to ask something else. Maybe about if Root was upset by being cut off from the Void? Clearly she was upset--anyone could see that--but was Shaw supposed to ask anyway? Would Root want her to?

“Are you hungry at all?” she asked instead.

“Hungry? No, I don't think so. I haven't been able to feel hunger for a very long time, you know. I'm just a little tired still.”

“Get some rest then.”

“And what will you be doing while I sleep?”

“I'll be here.”

“Watching me sleep?” Root raised her head enough to smirk.

“Cleaning my pistol actually. Oh, and drink this.”

Root made a face at the concoction of herbs and water that Shaw gave her, but she drank it anyway. “I hope whatever that was will give me nice dreams.”

“You could have asked me what it was before you drank it, you know.”

Root handed the glass back. “I trust you.”

“Well that's...dumb,” Shaw said with a scowl. She took the glass and went back to sort through her possessions to find her pistol-cleaning tools. Root was asleep again by the time she straightened up.

* * *

 

Watching Root sleep was peaceful for Shaw. At some point Root's fever had gone down and the worst of the flush had left her face, but her cheeks were still a little pink which Shaw thought looked kind of nice in contrast to how pale she'd always been before. Her hair had mostly dried out now and was curling around her on the pillows. Strands of hair stirred as she breathed deeply and evenly.

Why had Root protected her twice now and at great risk to herself? That didn't sound like the actions of the vast and unfeeling Void; that sounded like some dumbass human bullshit.

She left the room around noon to hunt down a serving boy in the hall and give him coin to bring food up to her room. Root didn't wake up when the food arrived and Shaw ate by herself. The day passed by slowly with nothing for Shaw to do but nap in her chair or look out the window. She even made an effort to start recreating some of the sketches she’d traded to Harper. Normally she'd have gotten restless in circumstances like these, but it actually felt nice. She hadn't had a real day's rest since before she'd left for Pandyssia and maybe a lazy day was something she’d needed.

She was awoken from her third uncomfortable nap of the day by a cold wind blowing through her hair. She reached out with one hand to try and find the coat hanging on the back of her chair, but instead found no chair at all. Her eyes shot open.

She was on a little stone island, suspended in space, surrounded by the grey flickering and shifting of the Void. The bed from her inn room was here as well, the only other thing on her island, and Root was still in it, sound asleep. Shaw knew without trying that she wouldn't be able to wake Root here, not now.

She looked around at the other little islands of dark stone floating out in space. Off in the distance she saw what she thought must be a whale, though it faded from view before she could be sure.

“Okay, I'm here,” Shaw called out into the Void. “And I get that your usual spokesperson is currently unavailable, but you're going to have to give me more to go on if you're trying to tell me something.”

There was a crunch of stone behind her and when she spun around a path of jagged rocks had formed leading down from her island. She paused to look at where Root lay sleeping once more before she followed. Maybe Root being here was the Void's way of telling her that it was watching over Root right now? Or maybe she was giving it too much credit.

The path led downwards to a larger stone platform and Shaw saw the basement of Brother Jacob's house laid out in pieces before her, frozen in time. Brother Thomas wasn't there, but his knife sat on the work table, its surface covered with runes that crawled across it too fast to read.

Nothing moved in the scene and Shaw continued to follow the stone path past it and away. The path went up now, and she had to climb over jagged ridges of rock to reach the top. She pulled herself up onto the last platform and almost fell right back off when an enormous whale swam by, so close she could have reached out and touched its underbelly as it swam upwards. She watched, transfixed, as the whale swam higher and higher and let out a mournful cry that echoed in her chest. Flames burst out through the whale and she watched in horror as the whale burned away, bleeding blue oil, and leaving nothing but a flaming skeleton, still swimming in space.

“What the hell?” Shaw said under her breath. But when she looked again, the burning whale had vanished and a new path had opened in front of her.

She recognized the indistinct shapes of Dunwall forming all around her as the Tower District, and the hulking shape looming over it as Dunwall Tower, home to the royal family. A knife floated in front of her, the first knife that Brother Jacob had taken, but even as she reached for it she realized it was far, far away and easily larger than the Tower itself. She watched as the knife turned and cut into the streets of Dunwall. A dark hole spread from the tip of the knife and Shaw felt herself pulled down towards it, like water swirling around a drain. All around her the Void creaked and writhed as it, too, was pulled by the current into the dark hole.

Something touched Shaw's arm and she grabbed at it, her eyes shooting open.

She was back in the chair in her room at the inn with Root standing over her, and she was twisting Root's arm in a way that couldn't have been comfortable even if Root seemed unbothered by it.

“Shaw, you were having a dream.”

Shaw released Root’s arm and slumped back in her chair. “I was, though not a normal one. I think your boss was trying to tell me something.”

“You had a dream in the Void?”

Something in Root's voice made Shaw look up at her. Root’s face was filled with what Shaw thought might be longing. It was hard to look at her now--barefoot, and features still soft from sleep and perhaps a little sad--and picture the way she usually was, so ethereal and mysterious.

“Pretty sure that's what happened. There were knives and flaming whales and all sorts of fun stuff.”

“Was I there at all?” There was a hint of uncertainty in Root's voice.

“Yeah, sleeping in this bed.”

Root sat down on the edge of the bed and looked down at the blankets as if she could will herself back into the Void. “I don't know what that means.”

“Me either.”

“Yes, but _I_ should know. I always know.” Root looked more exhausted--more human--than Shaw had ever seen her look. “I don't like not knowing.”

“Well, neither does anyone else, but we get by.” If Root thought she was going to get sympathy from Shaw over her inability to be smug and cryptic about knowing everything then she had another think coming. Root looked so defeated though that Shaw had to say _something_. “That trick I can do where I switch stuff around, I think I could stop it halfway through the switch, dump both items in the Void. If you were one of them you'd get a free ride back, right?” She'd spent a lot of time thinking about ways to get Root back, and this was the only one she'd come up with.

Root's eyes lit up for a second but then she shook her head. “I think that's probably a bad idea. I'm not completely cut off and I've got the impression that I should stay put for now.”

“Guess you'll be around for the end of this then.”

“That should be fun at least.” Root gathered the blankets from the bed and wrapped them around herself. “I wish it wasn't so cold here though.”

It was still fairly warm out this year and Shaw had put wood in the little metal stove in one corner of the room after the sun had set.

“Maybe you still have a fever.” She got up to check and Root sat quietly as Shaw put a hand on her forehead. “No fever. How the hell is this cold when you're used to the Void?”

“The Void is warm, comfortable. Safe.”

“Think we must be visiting different voids then.” Shaw took her hand away but Root grabbed it and trapped it between her own.

“Wanna warm me up, sweetie?” She said it with a joking lilt, but there was something unsure in her voice.

“You're injured,” Shaw pointed out without much force.

“Barely, and the damage mostly wasn't physical.” She tugged gently on Shaw's arm one last time and then released her and sat still, waiting for Shaw to make her mind up.

There were so many reasons this was a bad idea, but Shaw couldn't quite bring herself to care. She shoved at Root's shoulders until Root got the idea and slid backwards across the bed so Shaw could follow after her and hover over her on hands and knees. It was a lot like how they'd been three nights ago before Root had vanished on her with only a flimsy excuse. Root's eyes were locked on her and her fingers played with the clasps on Shaw's shirt. She didn't look like she was about to vanish this time.

Shaw must have hesitated for too long because Root grabbed her by her shirt collar and pulled her down to kiss her fiercely. Shaw almost lost her balance but steadied herself and dropped her weight down to her forearms so she could press herself closer. One of Root's legs wrapped around her and pulled her down so she was lying on top of Root, bracketed by her knees, their bodies pressed tightly together.

“Definitely much warmer like this,” Root teased with a grin and Shaw wondered if she really had been cold before at all.

There were things Shaw should have been dealing with now--things like tracking down Brother Jacob and finding out if there were any consequences she needed to worry about due to Root’s current situation. Who knew what Brother Jacob was getting up to with that knife out in the world? She pulled back from the kiss to remind Root, but Root chose that moment to dig her nails into Shaw’s lower back under her shirt and scratch stinging lines across it. Shaw head a noise suspiciously like a whine escape her own lips and there was no way she was letting that fly. She rolled her hips into Root, grinding them together and was pleased with the resulting gasp it pulled from Root. It was a good start anyway.

Somehow through the hazy fog of lust driving her brain, a thought occurred to Shaw. “Don’t suppose I got any, uh, fun powers from this whole deal, did I?”

Root chuckled and ran her hands up and down Shaw’s back. “Not the kind you mean, no, though the link to the Void does make you a little bit harder to kill and a little more...agile.” Root’s grin turned into a leer. “I’ll be sure to keep notes on that. For strictly professional reasons, of course.”

Shaw rolled her eyes but couldn’t hide her smile. “You do that.” She sat up enough to pull up Root’s shirt (carefully avoiding the bandage wrapped around her despite Root’s claim that it didn’t hurt at all), and helped Root pull it over her head. She paused once Root was lying under her completely bare from the waist up, unsure what she wanted to do next with so many possibilities spread out before her. Some part of her just wanted to stick her hand down Root’s pants and take her fast and hard, but some other part of her wanted to take her time, make Root beg. Root must have guessed at some part of her dilemma because she just watched Shaw smugly through half-lidded eyes, and bit her lower lip in a distracting way.

Shaw made up her mind and reached for Root’s belt.

There was a loud knock at the door and Shaw scrambled upright so she was sitting on Root's hips and yanked out the knife she’d had strapped to her ankle.

“Maybe if we stay really quiet they'll go away,” said Root from under her. “Keep the knife out, though. I'm sure we can find a use for it.”

Shaw opened her mouth to retort but then her brain caught up with her ears and she stared at her own knife dumbly for a second, possibilities dancing in her mind.

The second knock at the door was louder.

“Shaw, you in there? You're going to want to hear this.”

Shaw exhaled slowly and dropped her head to look down at Root. “Yeah, Reese, give me a second,” she called back. Root grinned and opened her mouth as if to add something so Shaw pressed the flat of her blade against Root's lips in warning for a long second.

“Behave,” she ordered quietly.

“Oh, Shaw, I think that's the last thing you want me to do,” Root purred and Shaw really couldn't disagree. She climbed off of Root and tossed her her shirt from where it had ended up on the floor. The blankets from the bed were a bit of a mess and Shaw dropped them on top of Root and left her to sort out the details while she went to answer the door.

“Everything okay?” Reese asked as the door swung open.

“Fine. I was checking the bandage on her stomach was all.”

Root smiled sweetly from where she was sitting on the bed with her knees drawn up to her chest. “Shaw has been taking very good care of me.”

“Uh, right.” Reese looked a little lost and it occurred to Shaw that he was expecting some mysterious and sober figure like the Outsider and not Root at her most obnoxious.

“What was it you were yelling about? Something I needed to hear?”

“I know where Brother Jacob is, or where he's going to be anyway.” Reese spared once more glance at Root as if he wasn't quite sure what he was allowed to say in front of her. “Tomorrow night he's invited to a Fugue Feast party being thrown by some very rich businessmen. Word is he has something he thinks they'll be interested in and he's looking for a buyer.”

“He's going to sell the knife?” Shaw asked. That didn't sound like what she'd imagined Brother Jacob might want.

“Not clear on that. All I've got is vague rumors. Someone did a number on him though--the Rat Catcher who tailed him said he looked like he'd been attacked by a wolfhound or something.”

A memory resurfaced for Shaw. There'd been some sort of creature back in the tunnel when she'd confronted Brother Jacob hadn't there? Had that been Root's doing? She looked over at her, but Root's expression gave away nothing.

“Guess we're going to Fugue Feast then.” She'd forgotten it started tomorrow night.

“Sounds fun,” Root said and Shaw could hear the eager anticipation in her voice, like she really thought it would be fun.

“We're going to need something else to wear,” Reese said.

“I can take care of that part,” Root offered. “I know _exactly_ what to get you.”

“I'll come with you,” Shaw said immediately. “No way am I letting you pick out my outfit.”

Root smiled and rested the side of her head on her knees. “Nothing would please me more.”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I originally wrote this as 5 chapters and then split them each into 2 to post and as a result this chapter was kind of short in comparison and not a huge amount happened. And next chapter all the things happen!


	9. Fugue Feast

There were fireworks going off all over the city seconds after the stroke of midnight. The night sky was illuminated with bright colors and below in the streets rats scurried away from the loud explosions. From Shaw's perch on top of one of the taller houses in the Tower District it sounded like the entire city had woken up all at once. There was yelling and laughing and the sound of shattering glass. Fugue Feast meant no rules and no regrets and even though the Empress had decreed that it lasted only two days this year (and had also strongly implied that murder would be frowned upon), everyone was determined to enjoy it to its fullest.

The aristocracy of Dunwall were largely out of town during Fugue Feast (ironic since they held wild and raucous parties all the time) as if only the sounds of the lower classes enjoying themselves could make them flee. Shaw half-turned to make a comment about that to Root before she caught herself. Root was stuck in the physical world for now and couldn't materialize on roof tops or use any powers like Shaw's which meant she got to wait down in the street with Reese. Shaw frowned at the empty space next to her--she'd gotten too used to having Root always able to hear her.

She pulled a metal spyglass from her coat and slid it open to its full length. Most of the impressive mansions in the city were in the Estate District, but there were a few grand mansions here in the shadow of the Tower. She looked up at the dark hulk of the Tower first, bits and pieces of the dream she'd had swirling in her mind still. Nothing stirred and after a minute she aimed her glass at the enormous estate down the road that took up half a block. It belonged to a man named Regus who now owned some of the holdings of what had once been Greaves Lightning Oil, an enormous whale oil processing company that had been all but shut down back during the plague when the Rudshore Financial District had flooded and destroyed most of its buildings. Its assets had been divvied up by people hoping to get their foot in the door of the whale oil industry. Even though the industry was slowly drying up now, there was still a lot of money in it for anyone who could bring in whales regularly, especially if they were set up with those sadistic devices that allowed the whales to be kept alive for much longer so the maximum oil could be extracted.

Regus had done very well for himself and if Brother Jacob was looking for money, Regus was certainly someone who had coin to spare. He wasn't aristocracy though, despite all his wealth, and he'd chosen to stay in the city for Fugue Feast rather than run away like the proper lords and ladies did.

Shaw couldn't see too much over the walls of his estate even from high up, but what little she could make out suggested there was a party in full swing. It didn't look at all like a place Brother Jacob would willingly go to, but Shaw had no other leads.

She gave up snooping and picked her way across the roof back to the rear of the building and traversed down to the ground in the alley where the others were waiting for her. Neither Reese nor Root batted an eye when she appeared next to them (Reese must have been used to people teleporting around from his time with Daud, and Root, well, was there anything that would surprise her?).

“I couldn't see much, but there's definitely some kind of shindig going on in there,” Shaw reported. “Shouldn't be hard to blend in if we can get past the guards.”

They'd all dressed for the part and even though Shaw felt a little silly in the black mask with gold trim that covered only the top half of her face, she had to admit she looked good in it. She'd cleaned herself up more than she had in a long time and her skin felt odd against the black silk jacket and red sash she'd worn. Root had opted for a mask that covered the top half of her face even more fully than Shaw's with black gems shining on it and a crown of black feathers sticking up from the front. The rest of her outfit was quite similar though her sash was gold and her pants legs were wide and loose so it looked almost like she was wearing a skirt.

Reese had followed their lead on the black theme and his mask was black and silver with a long beak-like nose protruding from it.

Even with the masks and the silk they were comparatively underdressed for Fugue Feast, something that became abundantly clear as they rejoined the crowds on the street. Bright-colored outfits abounded and costumes of all shapes and designs were evident. Shaw saw dozens of masks of various animals, but also strange deformed face masks, ones that seemed to be random clusters of geometric shapes, masks covered in vines and flowers, and a few that looked like skulls.

There was music coming from everywhere--both live and recordings played on audiographs--and street vendors selling meat pies and every type of intoxicating beverage one could imagine. People danced in the streets and three women playing instruments climbed on top of an overturned carriage to dance and sing. The doors to all the pubs were flung wide open and the parties spilled out into the street and onto balconies. It was shocking how much noise there was and Shaw almost missed her quiet nights aboard the whaling trawler. Or, strangely enough, maybe even her nights back in the jungle.

“Did you know the origin of Fugue Feast was so the Overseers could have a few days or weeks to willfully break all the scriptures?” Root asked, leaning down to talk in Shaw's ear. Shaw couldn't remember when Root had linked their arms together but Root was pressed close to her side now.

“Didn't know, but can't say it surprises me.” She tried to fend off a masked reveler who shoved drinks at them but ended up taking the glass in the hopes the pushy man would go away before she was forced to stab him. Reese and Root ended up with drinks as well. “Don't drink that. Could be drugged,” she warned Root.

Root scrunched her nose up as if Shaw had said something particularly amusing and then downed the whole glass in one go.

“What the hell?” Shaw hissed at her. “If you pass out I'm going to leave you in a drain pipe.”

“Relax, Shaw, it's just alcohol. Strong alcohol, though not very good.”

“How're you so sure about that?”

“I may be partly cut off from the Void right now, but I'm not completely blind. Less so than yesterday night, I think.” She sounded eager, like she could barely wait to get back. “Trust me.”

Shaw gingerly took a sip of her own drink and yeah it was definitely strong and mediocre but she couldn't taste anything off in it. Not the best idea with the work they had ahead of them tonight, but it was Fugue Feast and one drink was nothing to her.

And she wasn't about to let Root show her up.

“So how are we supposed to get in to this place?” she asked as she finished off her drink. She lobbed her empty glass at a nearby reveler who was yelling about something at the top of their lungs and smirked with satisfaction when they folded up and collapsed. “I could probably go right over the wall, no problem, but you two can't.”

She'd asked Root about potentially sharing some of her abilities with them like the assassin Daud had with his Whaler gang back when Reese had run with them, but Root had said that sharing wasn't one of Shaw's abilities which had made Reese snicker and then Shaw had been forced to throw something at him and the conversation had ended there.

“Whatever we do, it'd better be discreet,” Reese said. “Guards are out in force tonight.” He motioned up the boulevard where a large patrol was coming their way.

Shaw watched them cautiously. There were way too many guards there for her liking, enough that they'd be in trouble in a fight. “They're probably on extra high alert because of the vault robbery. Maybe we should find somewhere to wait for them to pass.”

“This way.” Root tightened her grip on Shaw's arm and pulled her away from the street and into a darkened doorway set back inside an alcove of a nearby building. “Here.”

Shaw grunted when her back hit the wall of the alcove but she went to push off the wall she was stopped by Root pressing her back into the brick with her whole body.

“What the hell, Root?”

Root chuckled in her ear. “Just trying to blend in with the crowd.”

Shaw had seen plenty of couples tucked away into corners as they'd been walking and had been disdainful, but now with Root's hot breath tickling the side of her neck and Root's hands sliding up her sides she was rethinking her opinion. The warmth of the night and the buzz of the alcohol in her blood and the beat of the music from nearby and the feeling of Root pressed firmly against her but still soft under her fingers all worked together to drive their mission from her mind. She didn't know where Reese had ended up, but somehow it didn't seem that important at the moment.

“You know what I think, Shaw?” Root murmured against her neck and Shaw decided that whatever smug bullshit was coming next wasn't something she wanted to hear so she grabbed Root's chin and pulled her face up so she could silence her with a fierce kiss. Root's fingers bit into Shaw's sides and Shaw fisted the fingers of her free hand into Root's hair to pull her deeper into the kiss. She shifted her stance when she felt Root's leg shifting against her purposefully and swallowed a moan at the feeling of Root's thigh pressing between her legs. Some part of her was dimly aware that Reese must still be nearby and that this was possibly the worst time ever to fuck in a doorway, and yet she found herself adjusting so that she could press her thigh against Root as well. She was pleased with the small breathy noise that drew from Root and dropped both her hands to Root's hips to encourage her to move against her. Root pulled back from the kiss enough to meet her gaze, her eyes half-lidded and burning bright in the darkness. All around them the music and noise of the night echoed and yet the darkness wrapped them in their own private world.

“Shaw!”

They both paused at the sound of her name being called from somewhere nearby. Root stared down at her through her mask with those solid black eyes of hers and her lips slightly parted. They needed to stop, but….

“Later,” Shaw said firmly. “This gets finished later and no more damned interruptions.”

“Wouldn't miss it for anything.” Root's fingers dug into her harshly again and then released her. She went to step back but Shaw caught her wrist.

“That means you don't get yourself killed tonight. No more of this jumping in front of me bullshit.”

“Shaw--”

“Let's go.” Shaw released Root's wrist and pushed past her before she could say anything else. Reese was waiting for her out on the street, his expression carefully blank.

“I scouted ahead,” he said. “Think I know how we can get in to Regus's estate.”

“Good. How?”

Shaw had been planning to sneak in somehow, either by picking a lock or traversing over the wall and letting the other two in, but that turned out to not be necessary.

“He's surprisingly useful, isn't he?” Root asked her as they watched Reese chatting with one of the guards who apparently had been the same one who'd helped him when he'd ‘fallen’ outside the Office of the High Overseer the other day.

“Reese is resourceful.” He'd gotten them out of some tricky spots before though never this way. Shaw watched as he gestured over at where she and Root were standing while explaining something to his new friend. The guard smiled and nodded a lot and Reese waved them over a few minutes later.

“We're free to go in, but I'm supposed to meet up with him later,” he told them.

“Are you going to?” asked Root and Shaw could hear the thread of amusement in her voice.

Reese just shrugged and led them past the guards into the estate grounds. The party was in full swing inside, with a group of musicians playing loud songs that clashed discordinantly with the music from the streets. There were tables of food and drinks all over the lawns and most of the party-goers were quite clearly intoxicated already. Shaw rolled her eyes at the couples who were indiscretely fucking in various half-sheltered parts of the yard but quickly looked away when Root smirked at her. Okay, so maybe they had been about to get it on in a doorway a few minutes ago, but that was different. They'd been hiding from the guards.

“The upstairs is off limits to the guests,” Reese told them in a half-yell in order to be heard over the music. “I'd bet that's where any type of business meeting would be going on.”

“Hell of a time to have a serious meeting,” Shaw yelled back.

“Exactly,” Root said, her voice much softer but somehow cutting through the din. “No one will be watching for it now. Well, except us.”

The ground floor of the house had been opened for the party as well and people came and went freely between the yard and the brightly lit rooms. Shaw had to elbow her way through a throng of people to get into a less crowded room that looked like some kind of library.

“For an exclusive event, there's sure a lot of people here,” she grumbled. “Did anyone see stairs up on the way here?” She looked around realizing they'd lost someone on the way here. “Where's Root?”

Reese shrugged. “She was behind me a second ago. Could she have gone back into the Void?”

“I, uh, don't think it works that way.” She tried to catch a glimpse of Root in the hallway but there were too many people crowded in. “Didn't you say there were a set of servants’ stairs in the back?” Root was probably off causing trouble or something, but she could take care of herself. They'd probably find her on the way up.

“Yeah, I think it would have been off the hall we passed.” Reese had tracked down an older blueprint of the house earlier in the day. They'd narrowed it down to a few rooms a business meeting might take place in, and only two of those rooms had been on the upper floor.

Even if they hadn't dressed for the part, it was doubtful anyone would have looked twice at them given how intoxicated all the guests acted. Shaw looked through the crowd for an glimpse of a black mask with feathers, but there was none. The servant staircase that led to the second floor was behind a guarded door in a lesser-used hallway of the house. Reese provided a distraction by lurching drunkenly down the hall and Shaw snuck up behind the guard and clubbed him over the head with a wooden statue of a fish she'd found on a hall table. She dropped the shattered remains of the statue on the floor--Regus was going to need a new conversation piece now.

“Where the hell did she run off to?” Shaw grumbled as they stuffed the unconscious guard into a hall closet.

“We could go look for her,” Reese offered.

“Let's just go.” She had a sinking feeling that Root had gotten ahead of them rather than behind them.

The servant staircase let them out into a small room with a dumbwaiter on the second floor. There weren't any servants around since most were busy downstairs and the hall outside the room was clear as well.

“Do we have a plan?” Reese asked her in a whisper.

“Yeah, kill our guy and don't die in the process.”

“At least it's straightforward.”

Shaw peered around the corner at the turn in the hall and saw two guards halfway along, standing at attention outside a shut door.

“That's gotta be it,” she whispered to Reese. “I think that room was the study maybe?” It connected to a small sitting room if she remembered the blueprints correctly and the door to the sitting room was right next to them. She motioned at the door so Reese got the plan and then cautiously pushed the door open.

The room inside had a few lamps burning, possibly for the sake of the lone guard who was sitting on one of the couches eating an apple. He froze when he saw Shaw, apple halfway to his mouth. There was no way Shaw wanted to risk the chance that this guy would be clever enough to yell for help first so she traversed to directly in front of him and punched him in the throat. He doubled over, clutching his neck, and she brought her elbow down on his head and he dropped like a rock.

Reese crept into the room after her and they both got close to the door to the adjoining room. Shaw could hear voices through the wood, but she couldn't quite make out what they were saying. She carefully turned the knob and eased the door open just a sliver. The voices became much clearer.

“--and the shortages are only getting worse,” a man was saying. “At this point any solution is being considered--well, almost any--but I must say that I'm surprised the Overseers are interested. I hadn't known any of you were left.”

“The Abbey has only ever had the best interests of the Isles at heart,” said a second voice which Shaw recognized as Brother Jacob. “As for my brothers, there are more of us left than you might suspect and so many of the citizens of the Empire still follow the scriptures.”

“Fine, fine, I honestly don't care why you're working on this as long as it actually does work,” the other man said. “Let's see what you have.”

Shaw tried to press her eye to the crack they'd opened the door, but she couldn't see more then some light through it.

“What is this?” the man asked. “One of those bone charms? I thought your lot weren't fond of those. Can't say I've seen one made into a weapon before.”

“It's not a charm, nor is it a weapon. It's a tool.”

“And this tiny knife is going to replace whale oil how?”

“Allow me to show you something else.” There was a sound of something being set down and cloth rustling.

“What in the Void is that?” the man asked.

“It _is_ the Void, Lord Regus, or rather a tiny sliver of its essence, trapped in a whalebone cage, but this tiny little bit alone could power an arc pylon for an entire day and this knife gives us the means to get as much of it as we need.”

Shaw's stomach dropped unpleasantly when she realized what Brother Jacob was really doing with that knife--proposing that it be used to slice away pieces of the Void to use as a replacement fuel for whale oil. And if the Overseers controlled the new primary source of fuel for the Isles then the Empress would be forced to concede to any terms they had. It was a damn good plan, a lot better than she would have thought Brother Jacob capable of.

She thought back to that dream she'd had where the knife had ripped a hole in the world and the Void had drained into it. This was definitely what Root had wanted her to stop.

“I can give you a demonstration of how it's done, if you wish.”

Shaw heard the distant sound of a door opening, the one in the next room with Regus that led to the hall, and then some muffled talking.

“I think we have an even better way for you to demonstrate,” Regus said after a minute. “My men caught an intruder just now, you see. It took five of them to subdue her and she took three down by herself though no one is quite sure how. They all just went mad my men say. And there's a curious thing about her: her eyes are black as the night. Sound familiar?”

Shaw almost kicked the door open right then, but she made herself wait. If they had Root then she had to be careful. She heard a sharp hiss of breath from the other side of the door.

“I _knew_ I saw that thing in the tunnels that day,” Brother Jacob said, voice triumphant. “Everyone said the Outsider was gone, but he's far too tricky for that. He must have gotten himself a new body.”

“Bring her in,” Regus called. “Now what do you think your little knife would do to a true creature of the Void? Do you think she could be drained for Void energy as well the way we drain the whales of oil?”

“I'm not sure, but won't it be interesting to find out?”

There were a series of muffled thuds and then a grunt that Shaw recognized as unmistakably Root's. Shaw pushed the door open another crack so she could see in fully. Everyone in the room was looking away from her door at where Root knelt on the red carpet, a thin trail of blood running down from the corner of her lips which were curled into a defiant snarl. Two guards held her arms behind her back and another had a gun aimed at her head. The two masked Overseers behind Brother Jacob stepped forwards as well though neither drew a weapon yet.

“What sort of new witchcraft are you then?” Brother Jacob asked as he approached her, knife in hand. “Are you really the Outsider, or are you some new puppet?”

“I'm something beyond your understanding, old man.” Root's eyes darted all around the room as if assessing her options. Shaw felt the second when they locked eyes go through her like a shot of adrenaline but then Root was already looking elsewhere as if she hadn't seen her at all.

“Do you know what this is?” Brother Jacob asked, holding up the knife. “What do you think will happen to you if I cut you with this?”

Root's eyes were fixed on the blade with a look of distaste. Shaw remembered how unnerved she'd seemed by it back in the vault.

Root's lips twisted into an amused but menacing grin. “You really have no idea how idiotic it is to threaten me, do you?”

“Why? Is the Void going to protect you?” the tall man who must have been Regus asked. “Why did it allow my men to capture you then?”

“The Void isn't who you should be afraid of right now,” Root explained as if to an ignorant child. “I have other forms of protection you have no defense against.” Her eyes flicked quickly to where Shaw was hidden and it clicked for Shaw that Root was talking about her. She cursed under her breath. It was presumptuous of Root to just assume Shaw would charge in there for her. Why should she? Brother Jacob lowered the knife towards Root as if to scratch it along her arm.

Shaw kicked the door open so hard it slammed into the wall and made all the men in the room spin around. She saw the guard with the gun raise it towards her and she held up her hand and again felt that pull of power she'd felt back in the sewers. A pool of black smoke rose from the floor in front of her and a massive hound made from darkness itself formed in mid-leap as it flew to attack the guard with the gun. Shaw watched it for half a second too long, fascinated by the way it tore at the man's arm. A shout drew her attention back to the others.

Root was no longer restrained and one of the two men who'd been holding her was lying on the ground screaming, though there was nothing wrong with him that Shaw could see. Root turned to face the other one, but Brother Jacob was still there with his knife, moving up behind her.

Shaw traversed across the room behind him but had to jump back when he spun around to slice wildly at her. He must have expected the attack and been waiting. The knife was still in his hand as he approached her and she pulled her own blade from her belt. Further back in room she caught a glimpse of Reese fighting someone in the doorway and she thought she saw a glimpse of Root's brown hair, but Brother Jacob and his knife kept most of her attention. The mark on the back of her hand pulsed like a heartbeat as she watched the edge of the knife slice through the air. There was a cry from behind them and Shaw risked glancing up long enough to see Root fall to her knees halfway across the room towards them, her face twisted in pain.

Brother Jacob sneered at them both and flicked the knife through the air again and Root cried out again even though it was nowhere near her.

He must have been damaging the Void with it, Shaw realized. She blinked and then she could see it clearly--the dark cuts in reality in front of her. She didn't even stop to wonder how easy it was this time or how she instinctively understood that what she was really doing was something like opening her eyes a second time. It was an easy transition now that she stopped trying to force it and relaxed into it. The silver-grey of the Void overlapped her world and she could see everything: the tears in front of her and the dark glowing menace of that knife. Brother Jacob looked much the same but Root was a little less corporeal now and an angry black line pulsed across her stomach from the cut the other knife had left. Behind her, Regus loomed, almost all the way over to where they were fighting.

Shaw could see both the floor below her feet and the grey stone of the Void island they were over as well. Brother Jacob advanced on her, swinging his knife with more purpose now and she blocked his attacks while a plan formed in her mind.

She waited until he swung again and then grabbed his arm and twisted it hard. He let out a gasp of pain and she stepped forwards, slamming into him with her shoulder with the full weight of her body behind the strike. He staggered backwards a step or two and she released him and quickly twisted the world so that he and Regus both slipped into the Void, moving as if Shaw meant to swap them, but she stopped the swap short with each man still in the Void, stuck halfway and dangling over the emptiness. For a moment everything was frozen and then both men fell into the bottomless Void, screaming.

Shaw relaxed and the grey shimmering of the Void faded away and left her standing, exhausted, fully in the real world. Over by the far door she saw Reese taking down the final remaining Overseer. Safe for now then. The dark hound she'd summoned was nowhere to be seen (though she could see its handiwork in the form of wounds on several on the downed men) and Shaw wondered if the strain on summoning the creature was why she felt so tired now.

Root stood up nearby, shaky on her feet, and Shaw moved automatically to grab her arm and steady her.

“Are they dead?” Shaw asked. She hadn't planned to kill Regus originally, but he'd been willing to experiment on Root so she figured it wasn't a big loss.

“Yes, quite dead, or will be very shortly.” Root's voice sounded a bit shaky. “Can you do something about that?” She pointed to where the whalebone knife lay on the carpet, abandoned. It must not have made it into the Void with Brother Jacob.

“Probably. Can you stand okay?” Root was kind of latched on to her but Shaw wasn't so sure that had anything to do with whether Root could stand or not. She peeled Root off and went over to examine the knife. The brand on her hand pulsed as she got closer and she half-expected the thing to attack her on its own. There was a solid metal statue of a dog on the small table nearby and Shaw used it to smash the knife into pieces on the floor. When the knife broke, the tension in the room popped like a bubble and the mark on her hand stopped throbbing.

“You two okay?” Reese had come over towards them. He held out a hand to try to steady Root, but she only gave him a pitying look and moved away looking a lot steadier than Shaw had thought she was.

“I'm good,” Shaw said, standing back up. They were going to need to take all the pieces of this knife with them, too. That was two knives she had to grind to dust now. “Root, you okay?”

Root beamed at her, her whole face shining. “I'm fine, Sameen.”

Shaw met her eyes and wondered why she wasn't more worried about what that look of Root's meant. She quickly turned away to gather up the fragments of the knife. “Where'd you run off to earlier anyway?”

“I'd hoped to take care of a few of the guards before you got here, give you a bit of an advantage. Unfortunately it's been a long time since I had to fight with none of the power of the Void available to me.” Root chuckled. “Well, almost none.” And Shaw wondered if that had anything to do with the one Overseer that Root had taken down whose eyes were still wide open behind his mask and staring into space. The way he was grinding his teeth suggested that he wasn't enjoying what he saw.

Shaw wrapped the knife shards in a piece of cloth and tucked it away. “We need to get out of here now before someone comes looking.”

No one stopped them on their way out of the house and back into the streets. Shaw felt tired beyond what she should have after such a short fight.

“That dog that I summoned--”

“What about it?” Root asked as they weaved their way through the crowd. Reese walked ahead of them to clear the path with his broad shoulders.

“Do you think I could summon it to stay?” The excitement of the fight was starting to drain away now.

“I'm...not sure actually.” Root had linked their arms again while Shaw hadn't been paying attention.

“Guess I'll find out eventually.” It had been a cool dog. “But this whole thing is over now, right? The knives are gone and Jacob and Thomas are dead.”

“Yes, it's over,” Root agreed. “With the knives destroyed and everyone who knew about them dead, there's little chance of someone else trying to continue their work.” She looked down at Shaw curiously. “What will you do next?”

“Was thinking about dealing with these remaining Overseers,” Shaw said. “The ones who’re still trying to cause trouble anyway.”

“That sounds very noble of you.”

Shaw squinted at Root suspiciously. Was she teasing her? “Not really. I just hate them and I want to be sure none of the others are going to get into this type of bullshit. Maybe Reese and I will run some jobs first to get a little coin.” She had a feeling Reese would follow her on this mission. “What about you? Returning to the Void soon?” The question sounded awkward to her but she hadn't been sure how else to ask. She wanted to know if Root was going to vanish on her now that the threat to the Void was gone, because the idea of not seeing Root again was more...unpleasant than Shaw had thought it would be.

“Hmm, well, my wound is definitely healing, as is yours--” And Shaw acknowledged that her arm did feel a little better now. “--so once it's healed enough I'll be going back. Maybe in a few days.”

“Ah, that's good then.” She turned to look at Reese's back and tried not to think about how quiet it would be without Root around.

“I'll still come visit you, Shaw, if that's what you're worried about.”

Shaw scowled. “Who's worried? You're a pain in my ass,” she grumbled half-heartedly.

Root's smile widened. “And I'm definitely around for the rest of the night at the very least. Though you look like you might not be up for anything more exciting than a nap.”

“Oh, I'm up for a lot more than that,” Shaw said.

“Mmm, I was hoping you'd say that.”

Root picked up the pace, stepping on Reese's heels until he sped up, and the three of them made their way back to the inn through the crowd of revelers.


	10. Epilogue

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is fairly E-rated. I kinda went back and forth over whether or not to bump the entire fic rating for it, but I decided to stay at M. I marked off the sex scene with horizontal lines so anyone not here for that can skip it.

Shaw woke up in the middle of the night and sat up in her bunk. Nothing moved in her small cabin and all around her the sounds of the ship engines droned soothingly. _Her_ ship, that she'd bought with money she'd made off selling quite a few of Regus's possessions on her return trip to his estate. She could have gotten an apartment in Dunwall, but that hadn't felt right. The ship (which she'd ended up naming the Leviathan despite it being barely half the size of a trawler) could go anywhere she needed it to whenever she needed it to and _that_ had felt right.

Somewhere on one of the decks above her, Reese would be keeping watch even though they were in relatively safe waters now. While most of their time was spent sailing between the Isles as they tracked down the last vestiges of the Overseers, they did dabble in some light piracy from time to time to help pay the bills, but they were far away from where any of the Navy ships might patrol.

She fell back onto her bed and let out a deep breath as she tried to relax. She had a few more hours before she had to be up and she could use the rest.

“Hey, sweetie.”

Shaw groaned and sat back up. Root was sitting in the chair by her desk, a leg dangling over one of the chair arms. “Did you miss me?”

Root had been gone for almost two months now, only showing up for brief incorporeal visits where she'd reverted to cryptic messages and left far too quickly.

“No.” She didn't think Root bought that even for a second. “Are you, uh, better now?”

The reason Root had been away had partly been to mend her connection to the Void. Once she'd been able to return she'd wanted to stay until she was done healing. The days before she'd been able to return had been quite...enjoyable though.

“Much better. That's why I'm back.”

“Well, you, uh…” She'd been about to tell her she looked good, but that seemed like a weird thing to say to the avatar of the Void. “That's good.”

Root's amused smile said that she could see right through Shaw's awkward response. She got up from her chair and came over to the bed. “Did you miss me?” she asked again as she climbed onto the bed.

“I missed _this_ ,” Shaw allowed as she reached for her.

Some time later they both lay naked next to each other, the sheets discarded in a tangled mess on the floor. The small round window in the cabin was open and the smell of the sea permeated the air. Root played with Shaw's hand, tracing the mark on the back with one finger. Shaw had graciously allowed Root to curl up next to her and had even gingerly put an arm around her. Two months away called for a temporary lift of the cuddling ban she'd set down.

She brushed one finger across the dark line on Root's stomach, a scar from Thomas's knife that Shaw suspected would never go away completely. She had a matching one on her arm, though the physical effects of the wound had finally faded. A shiver ran through Root as Shaw traced the scar and Shaw repeated the motion and watched Root's face this time. Her eyes were half shut and her lips slightly parted. She looked ethereal even when she was fully in the physical world.

“Are you going to be away like that more now?” Shaw asked. “Doing whatever it is you do for the Void?”

“I'll be around, Shaw. You can't get rid of me that easily.”

“Good.” Shaw realized what she'd said and hurried to prevent any misunderstandings. “I mean, we could use your help. With our work and stuff.”

Root's smile was a little too smug for Shaw's liking and she jabbed her in the side with one finger. The grunt that drew out of Root was...distracting.

“I have things that need to be done in the Void and in other places, but I'm not going to vanish on you, sweetie.” Root pushed forwards a little into Shaw's hand which had dropped down to run along her thigh. “Oh, and I appreciate the little pranks you've been pulling with the whaling trawlers. I was touched.”

They hadn't been looking for the trawlers specifically, but they did seem to keep running into them and maybe Shaw had slipped aboard a few and broken some key bits of the harness and pulleys they used to capture whales. It had just been for fun. It wasn't like she was doing it for Root or anything silly like that. The question of a replacement for whale oil remained, but Shaw figured that saving the few whales that were left was more important than prolonging the inevitable. Maybe it would even spur the Empire to find a real replacement. There hadn't even been a whisper of anyone pursuing the route Brother Jacob had proposed and Shaw hoped that it had truly died with him and Brother Thomas. There had to be other answers to the problem out in the world, but no one would look for them if an easy solution was close to hand, no matter how destructive that proved in the long run.

Root was still smirking at her and Shaw decided that was quite enough of Root acting like she knew some big secret about Shaw's motivations. She shoved Root until she sprawled over onto her back in the beam of moonlight that filtered through the window and across the bed. She rolled on top of her and relished the feeling of their sweaty skin pressed together. Root's hands gripped her hair, hard, and pulled her down into a rough kiss.

* * *

 

It was always fascinating to Shaw the ways in which Root did and didn't mimic human physicality. Shaw had never seen her eat or drink anything except for some alcohol that one time, but the taste of the sweat on her neck as Shaw's tongue swirled in the hollow of her throat and the breathy moan it pulled from her was very real, very human, as was the way her body reacted when Shaw's hand slipped down between her legs again.

Root was electric beneath her, her body solid enough, but rippling with echoes of the Void. All around them the cabin shimmered in and out of existence and the grey and silver of the Void flickered in through the cracks. Root's hands trailed across her back so lightly they almost felt like a breeze and then her nails dug in sharply and dragged stinging lines across Shaw's shoulder blades when Shaw sank into her with two fingers. Root was hot and tight around her fingers and Shaw paused for just a fraction of a second to enjoy the sensation, curling her fingers and smirking at the way Root's breath stuttered out and her hips tilted up into Shaw. Root's fingers tightened their grip and her leg wrapped around Shaw to urge her on.

“Sameen…” Root's voice was a desperate whine in Shaw's ear and it sent a sharp spike of heat through her and she sped up her fingers and buried her face in Root's hair.

“Sameen.” Root's voice was a little more purposeful now and she tugged on Shaw's hair until she lifted her head back up.

The Void stretched out around them like a giant shattered mirror. Everywhere hundreds of reflections of them moved in unison. It was almost hypnotic for Shaw to watch the way they rocked into each other echoed in a million fragments around them, her own eyes bright and dark staring back at her from every angle and the sight of Root spread out below her sending a thrill of want through her.

“Are we in the Void?” Shaw asked between panting breaths.

“We're everywhere and we're nowhere,” Root murmured into her ear.

“Can you at least cut it out with the cryptic mystical bullshit while we're doing this?” Shaw grumbled without any real malice. She added a third finger and Root's response was cut off by a desperate moan. Shaw lowered her mouth to Root's throat to lick the sweat there again. Root's skin tasted sharp and electric, like she was a fragment of the Void herself (which maybe she was).

Shaw was distracted enough by the flickering reflections all around them and the taste of Root's skin that she didn't notice Root's hand until it slipped between her legs. She readjusted slightly to give Root better access and groaned when Root's fingers slipped inside her, their arms brushing together as they thrust into each other.

It was odd, Shaw thought as she ghosted her free hand down Root's side, skin soft and wet with sweat under her fingers, that while all her time spent in Pandyssia she'd been uncertain about what was part of the real world and what was the Void, here with Root like this with both their worlds rippling around them she felt strangely grounded and at ease. Like they'd found a place between their worlds where they both fit naturally.

Root was getting more desperate now, breathing in short, erratic gasps, and clawing at Shaw's back with her nails. Shaw switched her pace up a bit to slower, deeper strokes, each of which pulled some of the most wanton noises Shaw had ever heard from Root. She wished she had time to use her mouth on her now, but Root was so close and they still had the rest of that night ahead of them so instead she bit down hard on Root's neck and felt her spasm around her fingers. She looked up to watch Root fall apart magnificently in a thousand different reflections all around them.

She slowed her movements inside Root even as Root sped up the pace of her own fingers and Shaw followed her over the edge and collapsed on top of her in a sweaty heap. Under her, Root relaxed back into the bed, spent and satisfied. The world around them solidified back into Shaw's cabin on the boat.

* * *

 

Root smiled up at her, face blissful and eyes unfocused. “Mmm, I missed you, too, Sameen.”

Shaw rolled her eyes and flopped back onto the bed next to her. The warm breeze from the window felt nice against her bare skin and the rocking of the boat was familiar and comforting. She felt good, truly at peace in her own skin for the first time in over a year.

Root scooted over to curl up against her and butt her head up under Shaw's chin so she could lie on her chest. Shaw raised an arm to push her off and then paused. She didn't feel any less at peace this way and Root felt kind of nice pressed up against her like this. She figured they probably could use a few minutes to relax before they got back to the fun, and why not let Root relax right here? She dropped her arm back down to the mattress and felt Root smile against her skin.

Some time later Root stirred enough to prop her chin up on Shaw's chest with one hand. “What're you going to do when all the Overseers are dead?”

“I'm not sure yet.” Though she'd been thinking about it a lot recently. “Maybe I'll go back to Pandyssia again, on my own terms this time.” She kept having the nagging sensation that she wasn't done with the place.

Root tilted her head, curious. “I thought you hated Pandyssia.”

“I mean it wasn't a _great_ experience at the time, but I was thinking maybe we've been going about it all wrong.” She still couldn't believe she might actually _miss_ the damned place with all its chaos and danger, but there was a lot to be said for somewhere free of the complications of the human world, and with her own ship she could come and go as she pleased (as soon as she figured out how to deal with the large tentacled sea monster that had torn the expedition boat to shreds, but maybe Root could help with that).

She'd spent a lot of time thinking about Root and the Void and Pandyssia since the night they'd killed Brother Jacob. The normal world felt almost fake to her now, like she could only see a very shallow version of reality, and more and more she purposefully drifted into seeing both worlds at once. Now it seemed almost unfathomable that everyone else had such limited sight when there was so much there right beyond that edge of their vision.

“All the people from the Isles have been going there to conquer and categorize and tame the land and I don't think that's a fight we'll ever win and I'm not sure it would help anything even if we did. I think maybe, maybe it's like the whales, you know? Not hostile by nature but by need.” Maybe there was even a hint there of a way to replace whale oil with something less destructive.

Root's black eyes gave away nothing, but her smile widened. “I love it when you go all philosophical on me, Sameen.”

Shaw poked her in the side. “You asked. Don't make me dump you back in the Void.” Not that she thought that trick would work on Root unless she allowed it.

“I think I might have a little more time before I have to go back,” Root said. She grinned at Shaw and then slid down Shaw's body and between her legs.

The little time Root had stretched to last the rest of the night, long after they'd gotten too exhausted to do anything but lie in the darkness together. Root drifted off to sleep (something Shaw wasn't sure she usually did, but she definitely did when sharing Shaw's bed) and Shaw stayed up for a few more minutes, enjoying the warm darkness and the feel of Root's skin against hers and the smell of the sea and the distant song of a whale echoing across the water.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I did not really intend to have Shaw turn into a whale rights activist, but here we are.
> 
> Thanks for reading, y'all. I was really pleased with how this turned out and I tried to leave it open so I could write more for this AU someday if the mood ever struck me.


End file.
